Zionism & Russia

Zionism and Russia – Lecture 1

May 12, 2006

Zionism and Russia – Lecture 2

June 2, 2006

Zionism and Russia – Lecture 3

June 16, 2006

Zionism and Russia – Lecture 4

July 14, 2006

Zionism and Russia – Lecture 5

August 4, 2006

Zionism and Russia – Lecture 6

September 8, 2006

Zionism and Russia – Lecture 7

October 6, 2006

Zionism and Russia – Lecture 8

November 17, 2006

May 12, 2006

Leon Trotsky, whose real name was Leyba Davidovich Bronstein, said:

“We must turn Russia into a desert populated by white negroes upon whom we shall impose a tyranny such as the most terrible Eastern despots never dreamt of. The only difference is that this will be a left-wing tyranny, not a right-wing tyranny. It will be a red tyranny and not a white one.

We mean the word ‘red’ literally, because we shall shed such floods of blood as will make all the human losses suffered in the capitalist wars quake and pale by comparison. The biggest bankers across the ocean will work in the closest possible contact with us. If we win the revolution, we shall establish the power of Zionism upon the wreckage of the revolution’s funeral, and we shall became a power before which the whole world will sink to its knees. We shall show what real power is. By means of terror and bloodbaths, we shall reduce the Russian intelligentsia to a state of complete stupefaction and idiocy and to an animal existence... At the moment, our young men in their leather jackets, who are the sons of watchmakers from Odessa, Orsha, Gomel and Vinnitsa, know how to hate everything Russian! What pleasure they take in physically destroying the Russian intelligentsia — officers, academics and writers!...”

[As recorded in the Memoirs of Aron Simanovich, a jeweler at the court of the Tsar’s Imperial Majesty, secretary of Rasputin and quoted in numerous Russian scholarly works, including The Nature of Zionism By Vladimir Stepin, published (in Russian) in Moscow, 1993 and translated into English (for Radio Islam) by Clive Lindhurst.]

Zionism. What is Zionism? And why does it give rise to such contradictory emotions, depending on whether the person is a Zionist or, because he is subjected to the effects of Zionism, knows what it is like to experience it and thus has at least some understanding of what it consists of? Let us first try to look into these questions.

Let me state at the outset that, in using the term “Zionism”, I will be referring not merely to the political tendency (or movement) which officially took shape at the end of the 19th century. No, what I will be talking about rather the ideology upon which that modern Zionist tendency is really based and which existed long before the founders of modern Zionism (Hess in 1862, Pinsker in 1882, Herzl in 1896, Ahad Ha-Am in 1902, Jabotinsky in 1906) published their views. (Well, my point is that modern Zionism is based not only on “Shana Haba B’yerushalayim” — “Next Year in Jerusalem” — which is the wish that Jews say at their Passover sedarim...)

This ideology has led to Zionism being practised through the centuries and is still menacingly active today...

The foundations of Zionism were formulated in ancient times, some three thousand years ago, and they are:

1. The Jews are God’s chosen people.
2. All other peoples are merely two-legged animals (goys).
3. The Jews have both the right and the obligation to rule the world.

The second and third points of this three-in-one formula actually follow from the first. The formula, which was the brainchild of an undoubtedly very talented politician of ancient times, was among the foundations of the religion of Judaism (see the book of Deuteronomy in the Old Testament). At that time people understood very well that if one is to lend force to one’s intentions, one must express them as religious ideas. And one must also strengthen not only the religion but also its influence on people.

Another reason why this ancient Zionist formula is, I would say, a stroke of genius is that, irrespective of religion, it is a most powerful way of influencing a person who believes that he belongs to the chosen people (in this case Jewish people). The only point is that if — as has been possible in recent times — he does not believe in religion, then the words “God’s chosen people” are replaced by “the people chosen by nature” or simply by “the chosen people”. And if someone’s opinions have not yet become firmly fixed, it is so easy, merely by a little application, to convince him that he is a member of what, in terms of intelligence, talent, audacity, etc., is the best of all nations, and that no other nation is fit to hold a candle to that one nation.

And, of course, it is impossible to persuade Zionists to change their views, because this formula was instilled into most of them in probably early childhood. Even Jews who may have broken with Judaism and its traditions nevertheless imbibed some of its values and transposed them onto modern politics.

And the Gentiles, we do not of course agree with the idea that we are two-legged animals, even if some of us (like so-called Christian fundamentalists, dispensationalists, Christian Zionists) have been led to believe that the Jews are indeed the “chosen” people and have the ability and the right to rule the world...

Another point is that the power of this three-in-one formula lies in that it legitimizes and sanctifies the idea of conquering, oppressing, perhaps even exterminating other nations. It goes like this: “Why need we care about two-legged animals? If we are the chosen people and it is our inalienable right, and even our duty, to rule other peoples, then God himself ordered us to grow rich at their expense, as the saying goes.” (Well, just read Deuteronomy in the Bible, everything is there, and it’s Judaism’s holy of the holiest — its Torah)

In this way ideology is placed on a material basis. Rob and rule! Rule and rob! Riches and power! From the time this formula begins to operate, it becomes both a means and an end, but it nevertheless also becomes a more important means, a means for attaining the main objective contained in the third item of the formula: the Jewish people must have, and will have, undivided, absolute power over the whole world.

Well, on the one hand, I always say that the whole community or nation or race shouldn’t be blamed for what some of its members say or do (even if those “some” are actually many). This is true, of course, for example, with the case of David Irving’s persecution and, now, his incarceration in Austria. I wouldn’t blame, for example, Jewish professor Norman Finkelstein, or Noam Chomsky, for what all those gloating Jewish community leaders are saying about Irving now. I think that Norman Finkelstein especially did no less (maybe even more) then Mr. Irving did, in order to uncover and expose all the lies of holocaust industry.

But, on the other hand, my opinion is (you can agree or disagree with this, of course) that Jewish community as a whole, yes, I would say is rather very different from all other people because of its unique solidarity, which wouldn’t be a bad thing, of course, if that solidarity weren’t directed against other nations and communities, as it is so often done now. There are many good people and also many bad people in every nation, but after many years of my experience and research I came to conclusion that among the Jews, for some reason, there is a much larger percentage of bad people than among others. I mean more than, say, among Chinese or Russians or any other nation. There is one and a half billion Chinese living on this planet now, there are also over a billion Indians (those in India), millions of Malaysians, Indonesians, and various other nations, peoples, tribes, communities... None of those cause as many problems in the world as the Jews and their Zionist Israel today, unfortunately, do. Not only today do, but always did. (This is what I’m going to talk now, just in a moment.)

Now, if you give me a blank sheet of paper and ask me to write names of some very evil people from among Jews that would come to my mind immediately, I could easily fill up that paper in just couple of minutes. On the other hand, if I ask you to repeat this same experiment by writing down names of, say, evil Chinese, you would probably have a hard time remembering others than just perhaps chairman Mao. And I’m not asking to write names of Lithuanians or people from some other very small nation, but names from among Chinese. From among 1.5 billion of them, from their whole ages-long history... Well, I think this says at least something why there exist such thing as anti-Semitism, but no thing such as anti-Chinism or anti-Lithuanism...

Of course, some of you can say that this is not true and even label me an anti-Semite, which is OK with me, I don’t really care. Especially now, after this recent absolutely outrageous savage treatment of “thought criminal” David Irving, I see that Zionists basically declared a war against people who dare to criticize them. By throwing David Irving into Austrian jail, Zionists basically declared war on all of us. I mean war not only against Irving personally but against also all other dissident historians, activists, writings, including myself.

My point is that if they provoke me, I have to fight back and stand up for my rights, such as freedom of speech. Because the violation of Irving’s rights is at the same time a violation of my own rights, concerning free speech, the right to say what I think. And, of course, I would never ever submit myself to such an infringement of my rights and reconcile with such a situation. Never! Just like I never submitted myself to the Soviet regime and the KGB, in my “previous life”. Therefore, as I said already, anyone is welcome to label me a “holocaust denier” or “anti-Semite”. I don’t care. As my academic hero, Professor Kevin MacDonald of California State University said recently: “We are increasingly approaching a situation where being labeled an anti-Semite is a badge of honor.” “The question is not whether I am anti-Semitic. The question is only whether I am right.” [John Bryant, Mortal Words, v 8]

And, of course, if David Irving were thrown into jail because, say, the Chinese would pressure Austrians to do that because of what he said or wrote about, say, some historic details of Chinese “Boxer Rebellion”, well then I would say the same things about the Chinese as I say about the Jews. But Irving, no, he had no problems with Chinese, and they had no problem with him. The only people that had problems with Irving were the Jews, the Zionists. Moreover, I would say that the only people who have problems with free speech today are, yes, all those Jewish organizations, like notorious Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith or the so-called Southern Poverty Law Center, and their crooked leaders.

When I start speaking or writing about things like these, I usually become unstoppable, so I can write pages and pages and pages... or talk for hours... It’s not just because I like to write or talk in general, but rather because I care what I’m writing about. And if I’m in a discussion with someone, I respect the person that I’m talking to, and so I just don’t want to write a few short lines or say few meaningless phrases. I don’t want to be superficial and thus I always try to base all my opinions on solid facts and explain everything with various quotations and usually even show books and articles and other available sources, like internet websites. So, anyone can check it by themselves. Because I myself always try to research things as much as I can, so, naturally, I expect others to do the same. Accordingly, my writings or talks are stuffed with a lot of quotations from books, newspaper articles, internet, etc.

I’ve done an enormous amount of research and collected a huge amount of various relevant materials to what I’m going to talk now, and I still keep doing that, because I want that everything I say would be based on solid facts and information, rather then entirely on my feelings. Actually I read over 500 books (637 to be exact) on these issues.

I know very well what is happening now in Europe, in Russia, where pressure from various Jewish organizations is truly enormous. I could provide you perhaps hundreds of examples that are nothing but rock-solid facts taken from various very solid sources, but I just don’t want to waste our rather limited time and I’m sure you understand what I mean. Right here in America these days those same Jewish organizations, such as just mentioned Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith or the infamous Wiesenthal Center are the most vocal pushers for some new so-called “hate speech crime” laws. What is coming to America is already widely implemented in Europe by the effort of, again, those same Zionist organizations. What I’m saying is based on solid facts. I know it very, very well, because I spent countless hours on research.

Therefore, what some kangaroo court in Austria is doing against Irving (or in Germany against Ernst Zundel, Germar Rudolf, and others) is all orchestrated and directed from New York, or even Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. Locking David Irving in prison for three years for expressing his opinions is nothing less than a crime against humanity. And so Abraham Foxman, ADL National Director gloatingly said in his official press release that “the Austrian court has sent an unmistakable and important message.” And all those Zionist leaders who like Foxman are gloating today in all the newspaper articles about how it is great to be rid of annoying Irving are, in my opinion, all are enemies not only of freedom of speech but also greatest enemies of humankind today.

Myself, well, to be honest, I didn’t really care much about all this holocaust controversy. Prior to all these recent arrests of so-called “holocaust deniers”, I had no problem with the official version of events in World War Two. I wouldn’t care about it if there wouldn’t be such pressure to conform with “party line”. Today I do. David Irving is a writer, more precisely a historian, is thrown in jail for expressing an illegal opinion. ILLEGAL OPINION!!! Just like it was in the former Soviet Union when we also were required to submit ourselves to official Communist ideology.

Now I do have a pretty good understanding of why this clampdown on revisionist historians and other dissidents, and why now? It’s been suggested that the Internet has panicked the Zionists, who to a large extent owe today their power and influence to the “holocaust” story. After all, Israel was founded on its memory and if it’s proven to be a lie, even partially, or at least a gross exaggeration, the power the Zionists’ hold over ordinary Jews could be undermined. For the very notion of the “holocaust” has been used not only to extract financial redress from other nations but also to keep ordinary Jews compliant. In effect, it has become like a grotesque doll wielded by witch doctors, used to keep individuals from asking too many questions, from thinking for themselves, or stepping out of line. Like Orwell said: “he who controls the past, controls the present...” and our perception of past events shapes the way we look at the world around us now. The Zionists understand this and know that the idea of the “holocaust” is crucial to their power. This is why certain Ian J. Kagedan, Director of Government Relations of the B’nai B’rith, stated that “Achieving our quest of a ‘new world order’ depends on our learning the Holocaust’s lessons.” [Ian J. Kagedan, “Memory of Holocaust Central to New World Order,” Toronto Star, Nov. 26, 1991.] Which is why such harsh measures are being exacted against those who ask too many questions.

OK, enough about the “holocaust”. Let’s go back to definition of Zionism and then move to Russia.

In telling this story I will challenge the vital premises of the establishment history and roast some sacred cows.

Again, when I talk something about Jews, I don’t necessarily mean every single person who is Jewish. No at all. No, what I mean is what I usually call Jewish Supremacism and those Jews who follow this peculiar ideology, which is actually the same as Zionism. I would say these are pretty much interchangeable terms. The Zionists are concerned not only about just taking over whole Palestine and creating “greater Israel” by getting rid of Arabs. No, those that I call Jewish Supremacists have much more sinister agenda. Some writers prefer to call them Jewish racists, but I disagree with such combination of words because the Jews aren’t a separate race, as far as I know (it is 100%-proven scientific fact) and so they can be perhaps called white racists (when they act as such), but not Jewish racists...

Well, I don’t want to go into some deep particulars, but I want to emphasize that there is definitely no conspiracy about what is going on, and I would never call it a conspiracy. It’s all very open and up-front. It’s just enough to open any “Who’s Who in America” book and do some basic research to see who are already in power. And I mean not just AIPAC, not even those who are puppet masters behind Bush and Cheney today, or who were behind Clinton. I mean all those leaders of numerous organizations such as World Jewish Congress, World Zionist Organization, and zillions of others. They are not secret. Everything is done pretty openly. And, as I said, the whole “holocaust” story is used today basically as a shield to hide all that is going on, much of which is originated, yes, in worldwide Jewish community.

Not only here in America but also in Russia. In a second part of this presentation next time I’m going to tell you about all those oligarchs who like vampires sucked Russia dry and took billions of dollars out, while Russian people were starving, and they ruined Russia’s economy, and culture, and social structures... and yes, yes, yes, they just happen to be all Jewish. Coincidence? Well, I don’t think so.

These things are not secret. You can read about them in books that are available even at our Eugene public library. One doesn’t have to be a researcher like myself to find out about what’s going on. The information is available and to deny these kinds of things would be, in my opinion, just equal to saying that “holocaust” never happened at all. I mean that saying that the Zionists (or Jewish Supremacists) have nothing to do with what is called today New World Order, is pretty much the same kind of ridiculous statement as would be real denial of what happened to many Jews during the WW2.

Even well-known Rabbi Daniel Lapin, who often makes quite strong statements, agrees that: “You’d have to be a recent immigrant from Outer Mongolia not to know of the role that people with Jewish names play in the coarsening of our culture. Almost every American knows this. It is just that most gentiles are too polite to mention it.” [Rabbi Daniel Lapin, “Our Worst Enemy”, Toward Tradition, January 20, 2005]

Now, will try to explain more about what I mean when I say Zionism (or Jewish Supremacism) because it’s important to understand meaning of the word, before I’ll apply it to Russia. This is Jewish moral particularism combined with a profound sense of historical grievance — hatred by any other name — against European civilization and a desire for the end of Europe with its traditional ethnic base. According to Jewish supremacists, the menaces of “extremism, hate and fundamentalism” — prototypically against Jews — can only be repaired by jettisoning the traditional cultural and ethnic basis of European civilization. And Russia would be only one example, among many.

You can disagree with me, of course, but my research lead me to believe that this Jewish hatred toward non-Jews emerged as a consistent theme throughout the ages, beginning in the ancient world. The Roman historian Tacitus already noted that “Among themselves they are inflexibly honest and ever ready to show compassion, though they regard the rest of mankind with all the hatred of enemies.” The eighteenth-century English historian Edward Gibbon was struck by the fanatical hatred of Jews in the ancient world: “From the reign of Nero to that of Antoninus Pius, the Jews discovered a fierce impatience of the dominion of Rome, which repeatedly broke out in the most furious massacres and insurrections. Humanity is shocked at the recital of the horrid cruelties which they committed in the cities of Egypt, of Cyprus, and of Cyrene, where they dwelt in treacherous friendship with the unsuspecting natives; and we are tempted to applaud the severe retaliation which was exercised by the arms of the legions against a race of fanatics, whose dire and credulous superstition seemed to render them the implacable enemies not only of the Roman government, but of human kind.” [Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chapter 16, p. 78.] The nineteenth-century Spanish historian José Amador de los Rios wrote of the Spanish Jews who assisted the Muslim conquest of Spain that “without any love for the soil where they lived, without any of those affections that ennoble a people, and finally without sentiments of generosity, they aspired only to feed their avarice and to accomplish the ruin of the Goths; taking the opportunity to manifest their rancor, and boasting of the hatreds that they had hoarded up so many centuries.” [Quoted in William Thomas Walsh, Isabella of Spain: The Last Crusader (New York: Robert M. McBride, 1930), p. 196.] And in 1913, economist Werner Sombart, in his classic book Jews and Modern Capitalism, summarized Judaism as “a group by themselves and therefore separate and apart — this from the earliest antiquity. All nations were struck by their hatred of others.” [Sombart, Jews and Modern Capitalism (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1913/1982 reprint),

p. 240.]

Myself, as I said, I always try to find out about everything myself, and so I do very careful research. This is exactly what I did when I wanted to learn more about the “holocaust” and Zionism and Israel, and especially about what I call Jewish Supremacism. For example, when I found some really weird quotations from Talmud, at first I simply couldn’t believe that such things can be said in Jewish holy book. For example these: “If a heathen (Gentile) hits a Jew, the Gentile must be killed, hitting a Jew is the same as hitting God” [Sanhedrin 58b]. “When a Jew murders a Gentile (“Cuthean”), there will be no death penalty, and what a Jew steals from a Gentile he may keep” [Sanhedrin 57a.]. “Even the best of the Gentiles should be killed (Tob shebe goyyim harog)” [Minor Tractates. Soferim 15, Rule 10]. And there are many more! It sounded just outrageous, so I just went to our University’s library and there is whole multi-volume Talmud available, so I spent a couple of hours and found where all those quotations are, and, yes, they are all true. [TALMUD, UO Knight Library # BM499.5 .E4 1989]

The Talmudic rabbis believed that in the eyes of God, Jew and Gentile were not equal. [Norman F. Cantor, The Sacred Chain: The History of the Jews (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1994), pp.107-108]

In the eyes of World Jewry, anyone but a Jew, is a heathen, a goy, or a cuthean, — all terms of contempt. The well known Jewish author, Josef Kastein, states (in History and Destiny of the Jews, p. 211) that “the laws of the Talmud proved exceedingly efficacious in binding the Jewish people together”, and that the Talmud was “carried with them everywhere” and “became their home”.

The reputation of the Talmud among liberal and secular Jews, especially in the United States, has undergone a big change in the direction of a highly favorable attitude in the past few decades. By the 1970s the Talmud was nostalgically seen by many secular Jews as belonging to the mainstream of what was good in the Jewish tradition. An Israeli Talmudic scholar, Aldin Steinsaltz, published a short, enthusiastic book called The Essential Talmud. An American paperback translation of it appeared in 1976 and has since gone through eleven printings. The Talmud had become a coffee-table book for suburban Jewish America! [Norman F. Cantor, The Sacred Chain: The History of the Jews (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1994), pp.102-103]

But when I asked some Jews about these quotes, I was given different answers. I heard everything from an angry, defensive “no, there is no such thing in the Talmud” to “there are words like that but they mean something else,” to (seriously) “you don’t want to know.” And, of course, throughout it all, I was accused of being an “anti-Semite” for even asking the questions. It is just ridiculous! It is exactly what prof. Finkelstein described as “beyond chutzpah”. Truly huge CHUTZPAH!

And, of course, in the process of my research I even found more outrageous things in some books, and then I went further in to research and I found books written by some contemporary Jewish religious authorities, such as, for example, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson.

What I call Jewish Supremacism is exactly what’s described in all such books.

In case if you haven’t heard about him, Rabbi Schneerson was a real Old Testament Jew, a Talmud Jew, who preached the unadulterated doctrines of the Talmud, including the doctrine of Jewish superiority and the doctrine that the Jews are really the chosen people of God, ordained to rule all the other nations of the world and own all their possessions. His sermons have been published, although you’re not likely to find them in any mainstream libraries. But I can quote at least a little bit, just to give you the flavor. The Lubavitcher “Rebbe” preached, describing the difference between Jews and non-Jews, for example, like this: “The body of a Jewish person is of a totally different quality from the body of a member of any other nation of the world.... The Jewish body looks as if in substance it were similar to the bodies of non-Jews, but ... the bodies only seem to be similar in material substance, outward look, and superficial quality. The difference of the inner quality, however, is so great that the bodies should be considered as completely different species. This is the reason why the Talmud states that there is a halachic difference in attitude about the bodies of non-Jews.... Their bodies are in vain ... An even greater difference exists in regard to the soul. Two contrary types of soul exist. A non-Jewish soul comes from three satanic spheres, while the Jewish soul comes from holiness.” [Israel Shahak and Norman Mezvinsky, Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel (Pluto Press, London, 1999), p. 59-60.]

I took this big quote from a book about Jewish ethnocentrism authored by two Jewish scholars, Israel Shahak and Norman Mezvinsky. As I learned from this and many other books, the ethnocentrism apparent in such statements was not only the norm in traditional Jewish society, but remains a powerful current of contemporary Jewish fundamentalism, with especially important implications in Israeli politics. For example, Rabbi Kook, the revered father of the messianic tendency of Jewish fundamentalism in today’s Israel, said that “The difference between a Jewish soul and souls of non-Jews — all of them in all different levels

— is greater and deeper than the difference between a human soul and the souls of cattle.” [also from same Shahak’s and Mezvinsky’s book Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, p. ix.]

I learned that such present-day fundamentalists simply just attempt to recreate the ages-old tradition of Jewish communities. Especially those before the European Enlightenment (i.e., prior to about 1750). During this period the great majority of Jews believed in Cabbala — Jewish mysticism. What the Cabbala says is that salvation is only for Jews, while non-Jews have “Satanic souls.” [Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, p. 58.]

Therefore, Rabbi Kook’s entire teaching is also based upon the Lurianic Cabbala, the school of Jewish mysticism that dominated Judaism from the late sixteenth to the early nineteenth century. One of the basic tenants of the Lurianic Cabbala is the absolute superiority of the Jewish soul and body over the non-Jewish soul and body. According to the Lurianic Cabbala, the world was created solely for the sake of Jews; the existence of non-Jews was subsidiary. If some influential Christian bishop or Islamic mullah argued that the difference between the superior souls of non-Jews and the inferior souls of Jews was greater than the difference between the human soul and the souls of cattle, he would incur the wrath of and be viewed as an anti-Semite. There is no doubt that teachings of Rabbi Kook or Rabbi Schneerson contain basic ideas about Jewish superiority comparable to the worst forms of anti-Semitism.

The Jewish supremacism today, as described by Shahak and Mezvinsky, are thus part of a long mainstream Judaist tradition which considers Jews and non-Jews completely different species, with Jews absolutely superior to non-Jews and subject to a radically different moral code. And the fact is that certain Jews, some of whom wield enormous political or economic influence, consider Jews to be superior to non-Jews and view the world as having been created only or primarily for Jews. The truth is that many Jews, especially religious Jews today continue to adhere to such traditional Jewish ethics that other Jews would like to ignore or explain away.

Few more examples: Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburg and Rabbi Yaacov Perrin declared respectively, “We have to recognize that Jewish blood and the blood of a goy are not the same thing” (New York Times, June 6, 1989) and “One million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail” (New York Daily News, Feb. 28, 1994). These are words of spiritual leaders in today’s Jewish community!

So this kind of ideology can be seen among those that I call Jewish supremacists (or Zionists). They say that Jews are better and that being so Jews deserve to rule over other people. The eternal uniqueness of the Jews, as they say, is the result of the Covenant made between God and the Jewish tribe at Mount Sinai. The implication is that such transcendent imperatives for Jews effectively nullify moral laws that bind the behavior of normal nations. Rabbi Shlomo Aviner, one of Israel’s most prolific ideologues, for example, argues that the divine commandments to the Jewish people “transcend the human notions of national rights.” He explains that while God requires other nations to abide by abstract codes of justice and righteousness, such laws do not apply to Jews. [Ian Lustick, “Israel’s Dangerous Fundamentalists,” Foreign Policy 68, Fall 1987, pp. 123-124.] This claim of Jewish uniqueness echoes also “holocaust” activist Elie Wiesel’s claim that “everything about us is different.” Jews are “ontologically” exceptional. [Elie Wiesel, Against Silence: The Voice and Vision of Elie Wiesel. Selected and edited by Irving Abrahamson (New York: Holocaust Library, 1985), vol. 1, p. 153.]

As I said, the ideas of Rabbi Schneerson were taken from a book of his recorded messages to followers in Israel, titled Gatherings of Conversations and published in Israel in 1965. During the subsequent three decades of his life until his death, Rabbi Schneerson remained consistent; he did not change any of the opinions. What Rabbi Schneerson taught either was or immediately became official, Lubovitch, Hassidic belief. He headed the Chabad movement and wielded great influence among many religious Jews in Israel as well as in the United States. As you of course know, the Lubavitchers are those strange-looking Jews one sees in New York wearing long, black coats and black hats, with sideburns down to their shoulders. There are also thousands of them in New Jersey, not far from where we lived. And Lubovitcher Jewish community in the United States, has often expressed his views in many publications. The following, for example, appeared in an April 26, 1996 of Jewish Week (New York) article that contained an interview with another Rabbi Ginsburgh who is regarded as one of the Lubovitcher sect’s leading authorities on Jewish mysticism. He speaks freely of Jews’ genetic-based, spiritual superiority over non-Jews. It is a superiority that he asserts invests Jewish life with greater value in the eyes of the Torah. “If you saw two people drowning, a Jew and a non-Jew, the Torah says you save the Jewish life first,” Rabbi Ginsburgh told the Jewish Week. “If every simple cell in a Jewish body entails divinity, is a part of God, then every strand of DNA is part of God. Therefore, something is special about Jewish DNA.” Later, Rabbi Ginsburgh asked rhetorically: “If a Jew needs a liver, can you take the liver of an innocent non-Jew passing by to save him? The Torah would probably permit that. Jewish life has an infinite value,” he explained. “There is something infinitely more holy and unique about Jewish life than non-Jewish life.” [Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, p. 62]

That’s is exactly what I myself call Jewish Supremacism! Changing the words “Jewish” to “German” or “Aryan” and “non-Jewish” to “Jewish” turns the Ginsburgh position into the doctrine that you or your colleagues, no doubt, would call neo-Nazi. Well, but you can perhaps say that this is what only some extremist Jews say and I do agree that what Lubovitcher Rabbis said is indeed pretty extreme, but they were and still are religious leaders of such large segment of Jewish segment as Hassidic Orthodox Jews, and they are present everywhere, not only in New York, but even here in Eugene. Right just a few blocks from where I live, on 19th Street, there is Chabad House. Those houses are in almost every college town! They are not some underground fanatics, but rather mainstream religion today. Well, you can say, of course, that not all of the Jews are part of those Lubovitcher, but this explains nothing. If this or that Jew isn’t a follower of Rabbi Schneerson or Rabbi Ginsburg, this does not mean at all that no large numbers of Jews follow teachings of such extremists. Quite the contrary. Myself, for example, I am not a Catholic, but it does not mean that Lithuanians aren’t Catholics. Many Lithuanians are very, extremely devout Catholics.

Therefore, as I said, given that ethnocentrism continues to pervade all segments of the Jewish community, many things are just too obvious and impossible to ignore and deny, and everybody should be aware of these things, regardless of being a Jew, or Lithuanian, or Russian, or Chinese. I could provide, as said, hundreds and hundreds of quotations and full articles. Who wants, just let me know, write an e-mail, and I give you any particular information upon request.

The book Kitsur Shulkhan Arukh was officially published in Moscow in 2001 by the Congress of Jewish Religious Organizations and Associations in Russia. That book is a condensed version of the Jewish law code, the Sulkhan Arukh, compiled centuries ago on the basis of the Talmud and required in practice to this day. In the introduction to the book the head of Jewish Religious Organizations and Associations, Rabbi Zinoviy Kogan, makes the frank acknowledgement that:

“The editorial council considered it necessary in this translation to omit some instructions of the halakha [Jewish law] ... whose inclusion in the publication in the Russian language would be perceived by the population of Russia, which does not adhere to Judaism, as an unprovoked insult. The reader who wishes to read the Kitsur Shulkhan Arukh in the ideally complete volume, is invited to come to a yeshiva in order to study this and many other holy books in the original.”

That is, one of the leaders of Russian Jewry himself recognized that some regulations of the Judaic code of behavior were insulting to the non-Jewish population of Russia, but considers it possible to invite his fellow tribesmen to yeshivas to study these insults. In the introduction to this book the head of Jewish Religious Organizations in Russia writes that “the Talmud is the unsurpassed monument of Jewish genius,” and this distillation of its morality, “the Kitsur Sulkhan Arukh is the anthology of the Jewish civilization of our time. ... This book is completely necessary for you. You can act in the manner that it prescribes and be confident that you have carried out the will of the Ex-lted.”

Well, I already quoted a little bit from Talmud.

The majority of Jews, of course, do not study the “Shulkhan Arukh.” But many generations of the self-contained life of Jews among other peoples (in this context there developed the idea of the Jewish kahal as a “state within a state”) led to the situation where the morality of the “Shulkhan Arukh” became a part of Jewish national self-consciousness even in its secular form. This conclusion was drawn by the well-known Jewish writer and sociologist Hannah Arendt:

“Precisely in the process of secularization was borne completely real Jewish chauvinism. ... The idea of the chosenness of the Jews became . . . the idea that Jews supposedly were the salt of the earth. From now on, the old religious concept of chosenness was no longer the essence of Judaism; it became instead the essence of Jewishness.” [Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Schocken, 2004), p. 99.]

Well, I hope I explained more than enough what I mean by Zionists or Jewish Supremacists and what difference there is between Jewish/Zionist supremacists and just ordinary Jewish folks.

And, now, Israel and all those Zionist/Supremacist organizations are preparing for a new war against Iran, as if there weren’t enough war in Iraq, which cost to America billions of dollars. They say that Iran is very dangerous because it wants to create a nuclear bomb, but it sounds absolutely ridiculous and bizarre for those who know that the nuclear bomb is an exclusively Jewish creation. If we look at the names of those who were behind the creation of American bomb, we see Oppenheimer, Teller, Szilard, and others. Again, at least 90% of them were Jewish. Well, you can of course say that they were simply following orders given by the US government, but isn’t this what Adolf Eichmann tried to say in his own defense? I would say that the creation of atomic bomb and then wholesale murder of hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians, wasn’t crime any less then what is called “holocaust”. Actually, if we take the word “holocaust” literally, look in the dictionary, it does mean destruction by fire... Yes, saying that those who created the bomb were just following orders is nonsense, because I studied these things a lot and I know that the whole Manhattan project was initiated by a letter to Roosevelt that Szilard wrote and Einstein signed. Well, Einstein, was always good at putting his name under other people’s writings...

Today, Israel itself has already hundreds of nukes and is threatening not only its Arab neighbors but other nations as well. Just listen what famous Israeli military expert Martin van Creveld said: “We possess several hundred atomic warheads and rockets and can launch them at targets in all directions, perhaps even at Rome. Most European capitals are targets for our air force.”

The chief power of Zionism lies in being silent. Them and us! The main point is that, whatever may happen, the whole truth about Zionism cannot be permitted to become widely known. That would mean the failure of the whole affair. An agreement to keep quiet is reached not only with their own people, but also with the most furious opponent of Zionism: they must keep quiet. Deal the blow, but keep quiet! A strong man is vulnerable because of his strength, and the Zionists say that there is no need to explain anything to people because, so they say, the danger has been eliminated, and you have done the business by using methods which are obviously not clean.

They have kept silent through the centuries! Of course, some facts do slip through the net, and it is not possible to keep one’s eye on everything. There is a fairly rich anti-Zionist literature at present, but it is only partial. It is not complete, and it does not clearly and precisely state the goals of Zionism, but the chief point is that Zionists are most careful to remove and liquidate such literature, never permitting it a wide distribution under any circumstances. Silence and secrecy are the main power of Zionism. They are the reason for its successes, and they are the factor that brings the Zionists victory!

One of the strengths lies in that they are not at all embarrassed about the means they employ. The directive which states “The end justifies the means!” was used by the Zionists long before the Jesuits. Of course, they have used such means right up to the present day and still are using them. Zionists know no moral standards. And why should they? They regard the Gentiles with whom they “work” as two-legged animals (please remember the three-in-one formula of Zionism!).

June 2, 2006

Leon Trotsky, whose real name was Leyba Davidovich Bronstein, said:

“We must turn Russia into a desert populated by white negroes upon whom we shall impose a tyranny such as the most terrible Eastern despots never dreamt of. The only difference is that this will be a left-wing tyranny, not a right-wing tyranny. It will be a red tyranny and not a white one.

We mean the word ‘red’ literally, because we shall shed such floods of blood as will make all the human losses suffered in the capitalist wars quake and pale by comparison. The biggest bankers across the ocean will work in the closest possible contact with us. If we win the revolution, we shall establish the power of Zionism upon the wreckage of the revolution’s funeral, and we shall became a power before which the whole world will sink to its knees. We shall show what real power is. By means of terror and bloodbaths, we shall reduce the Russian intelligentsia to a state of complete stupefaction and idiocy and to an animal existence... At the moment, our young men in their leather jackets, who are the sons of watchmakers from Odessa, Orsha, Gomel and Vinnitsa, know how to hate everything Russian! What pleasure they take in physically destroying the Russian intelligentsia — officers, academics and writers!...”

[As recorded in the Memoirs of Aron Simanovich, a jeweler at the court of the Tsar’s Imperial Majesty, secretary of Rasputin and quoted in numerous Russian scholarly works, including The Nature of Zionism By Vladimir Stepin, published (in Russian) in Moscow, 1993 and translated into English (for Radio Islam) by Clive Lindhurst.]

As we can see from this quote, Russia, of course, did not escape the attention of the Zionists. The Russian dimension of Zionism cannot be overestimated. It is perhaps impossible to describe all the activities of the Zionists in Russia. We shall only dwell on some of them.

FIRST, HOW ZIONISM PENETRATED INTO RUSSIA? Well, historical homeland of ancestors of most today’s Jews is actually in Russia.

The original Jews (those Hebrews of the Bible) were what we today would call Sephardics, Sephardic Jews out of the Middle East, who later went to Spain and Portugal when the Moors occupied the Iberian Peninsula. However, almost all Jews today are Ashkenazi which means that they are not descendants of the Sephardics (Hebrews), but originate from a band of ruthless tribe called the Khazars. The Sephardics, in search of army for their revolutions, chose the Khazars. The Khazars were converted to Judaism, and today they make up 95% of the world’s Jewish population.

The kingdom of the Khazars vanished from the map of the world many centuries ago. Today many people have never even heard of it, yet in its day the Khazar kingdom [Khazaria] was a very major power, indeed holding sway over a large empire of subjugated peoples. It had to be reckoned with by the two neighbouring superpowers of that day. To the south and west of Khazaria the Byzantine Empire was in full flower with its Eastern Orthodox Christian civilisation. To the south-east, the Khazar kingdom bordered on the expanding Moslem Empire of the Arab Caliphs. The Khazar’s influenced the histories of both of these empires but, far more importantly, the Khazar kingdom occupied what was later to become a southern portion of Russia between the Black and Caspian Seas. As a result, the historical destinies of the Russians and the Khazars became intertwined in ways which have persisted down to the present day.

In case you have never heard of the Khazars, I think that first of all I should mention where you can look to learn more about them. In 1976 a book about the Khazars was published by the British writer [a Jew] Arthur Koestler. The book is titled, The Thirteenth Tribe: The Khazar Empire and Its Heritage. The American publisher was Random House.

History records that the Khazars were derived from a mixture of Mongols, Turks and Fins. According to some records, they descend from Togarmah through his son Khozar. As early as the 3rd Century AD, they were identifiable in constant warfare in the areas of Persia and Armenia. The first mentioning of Khazars refers to the 5th century, at that time they were known as akatsirs, inhabiting the steppes of the northern Caucasus. Their language refers to the Bulgarian group of tursk languages. But no written texts have been found.

In the 5th Century, the Khazars were among the devastating hordes of Attila, the Hun. The death of Attila, however, precipitated the collapse of the Hunnic empire and left an Eastern European power-vacuum which the Khazars eventually filled. They then proceeded to subjugate all other surrounding tribes to the extent that, shortly after their defeat, those tribes went virtually unmentioned in subsequent historical accounts. The Khazars had just swallowed them up, historically speaking.

Around 550 AD, the nomadic Khazars began settling themselves in the area around the northem Caucasus between the Black and Caspian Seas. The Khazar’s capital of Itil was established at the mouth of the Volga River where it emptied into the Caspian Sea, in order to control the river traffic. The Khazars then exacted a toll of 10% on any and all cargo which passed Itil on the river. Those who refused were attacked and slaughtered.

In the middle of the 7th century they had already their own state which was called Khazar Kaganat. With the kingdom finally established in the Caucasus, the Khazars gradually began to create an empire of subjugated peoples. More and more Slavonic tribes, who were peaceful compared with the Khazars, were attacked and conquered. They became part of the Khazar Empire, required to pay tribute continually to the Khazar Kagan.

And so the Khazar Empire expanded northward to Kiev which is today the capital of Ukraine, on the Dnieper River. Then, the Khazarian Empire extended its territory from the Dniepr River in the west to the Aral Sea in the east, controlling most of the shores of the Caspian Sea, so that it is still called “Khazar Sea” in Turkish, Persian, Arabic and other languages. Eventually, it occupied an immense land area of over a million square miles extending in the west from what is today Hungary/Austria eastward to the Aral Sea, north to the Upper Volga, and its southern region extending to the Caucasus Mountains between the Black and Caspian seas. It was at that time literally the largest country on earth. This Kingdom of the Khazars is clearly revealed in a vast body of historical evidence, much of which has come to light only in the last three to five decades.

So powerful, socially and militarily, were the Khazars that, as Kevin Alan Brook relates in his work The Jews of Khazaria, “emperor of the Byzantines [Roman Empire], Constantine Porphyrogenitus, sent correspondence to the Khazars marked with a gold seal worth 3 solidi — more than the 2 solidi that always accompanied letters to the Pope of Rome, the Prince of the Rus, and the Prince of the Hungarians.” [Brook, The Jews of Khazaria] At the peak of their empire it is believed that the Khazars had a permanent standing army that could have numbered as many as one hundred thousand and controlled or exacted tribute, astonishingly, from thirty different nations and tribes inhabiting the vast territories between the Caucasus, the Aral Sea, the Ural Mountains and the Ukrainian steppes. Russian archaeologist Mikhail Artamonov states that, for a century and a half, the Khazars were the supreme masters of the southern half of Eastern Europe and presented a virtually impenetrable bulwark, blocking the Ural-Caspian gateway from Asia into Europe.

The Khazar’s original (indigenous) pagan religion was some wild form of Shamanism, consisting of a pantheon of nebulous gods, and they sacrificed not only various animals in their ritual ceremonies (preferably horses), but humans, usually the very cleverest and smartest among their captives.

Then, in about 740 AD, a stunning event took place. The Khazars converted to Judaism!

In his famous book, The Thirteenth Tribe, the Jewish author Arthur Koestler relates in considerable detail that following this bizarre series of events: “... in 732

— after a resounding Khazar victory over the Arabs — the future [Byzantine Catholic] Emperor Constantine V married a Khazar princess [baptized Eirene]. In due time their son became the Emperor Leo IV, known as Leo the Khazar. A few years later, probably AD 740, the [Khazar] King [Bulan], his court and the military ruling class embraced the Jewish faith, and Judaism became the state religion of the Khazars...” [The Thirteenth Tribe, p. 14]

Now, this odd mass-conversion of the wild and woolly Khazar Kingdom, we learn, was but “a cunning political maneuver”, since this bothersome tribe was then surrounded on all sides by hostile tribes. The Khazars had been under continual pressure from their Byzantine and Moslem neighbours to adopt Christianity or Islam. So, in the year 740 AD, King Bulan, the King of Khazaria, decided to adopt some monotheistic religion. According to legend, he was responding to dreams or visions. But, of course, it’s more probable that the realities of power politics played a large part in this decision. Bulan’s Empire was adjacent to the Byzantine and Muslim Empires. I presume that there must have come a time, in the midst of all the bloodshed, when he began to wonder just what it was that made the Arabs and Christians such furious proselytizers. So he began to study religion.

The actual mechanics of the Khazarian kingdom’s turn to Judaism was, most historians agree, rather well thought out rather than random and capricious as some have believed. According to George Vernadski, in his book A History of Russia, in AD 860 a delegation of Khazars were sent to Constantinople, which was then what remained of the ancient capitol of the old Roman Empire turned Christian under the Emperor Constantine. Their message was:

We have known God the Lord of everything [referring here to Tengri] from time immemorial ... and now the Jews are urging us to accept their religion and customs, and the Arabs, on their part, draw us to their faith, promising us peace and many gifts. [George Vernadsky, A History of Russia, Vol. 1 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1948), p. 346.]

This appeal, in all its implications, was obviously made for the purpose of drawing the Christian Roman Empire into the debate with an eye perhaps toward a balanced argument amongst the major monotheistic religions. Kevin Brook makes the observation that “this statement reveals that the Jews were actively seeking converts in Khazaria in 860.” He also adds that “in the year 860, [Christian] Saints Cyril and Methodius were sent as missionaries to the Khazars by the Byzantine emperor Michael III .... since the Khazars had requested that a Christian scholar come to Khazaria to debate with the Jews and Muslims.” [Brook, The Jews of Khazaria] Inasmuch as the world has seldom (or perhaps never) witnessed any culture of people more adept at the art of religious debate than rabbinical Jews, the Khazar’s conversion to Talmudic Judaism is not a surprising outcome, given that such a forum was to be the determining factor in their choice, rather than purely spiritual perceptions.

The legend states that Bulan invited representatives of the three faiths (Christianity, Islam, and Judaism) to visit him in Itil, his capital city on the mouth of the Volga River near the shores of the Caspian Sea (which was, as I just said, called the “Khazar Sea” in those days). Each representative gave a powerful argument for his respective faith. King Bulan was unable to choose. So he sent the three representatives out, and called back the Christian by himself. He asked him which of the other two faiths he should choose, should he decide to reject Christianity. The Christian, without hesitation, began railing against the Muslim religion, and strongly advocated Judaism. Likewise, the Muslim railed against Christianity, and advocated Judaism. So Bulan took their advice. He rejected both Christianity and Islam, and he became a Jew. The king then concluded that Judaism, being the foundation upon which both of the other monotheistic religions were built, would be that which he and his subjects should embrace.

According to Benjamin Freedman the Khazars’ conversion to Judaism was also first precipitated by their monarch’s abhorrence of the moral climate into which his kingdom had descended. Freedman has claimed, and other historians confirmed, that the pagan Khazars engaged in extremely immoral forms of religious practices, among them phallic worship.

Yet, Koestler’s position was that the king’s conversion was essentially a political decision. “At the beginning of the eighth century,” he writes, “the world was polarized between the two super-powers representing Christianity and Islam. Their ideological doctrines were welded to power-politics pursued by the classical methods of propaganda, subversion and military conquest.” “The Khazar Empire represented a Third Force,” Koestler continues, “which had proved equal to either of them, both as an adversary and an ally. But it could only maintain its independence by accepting neither Christianity nor Islam — for either choice would have automatically subordinated it to the authority of the Roman Emperor or the Caliph of Baghdad.” [Koestler, The Thirteenth Tribe, p. 58.] It was clear that the Khazars were determined to preserve their supremacy as a “Third Force” in the world, and undisputed leader of the countries and tribal nations of the Transcaucasus. They saw that the adoption of one of the monotheistic religions would confer upon their monarch the benefit of both prelatic and judicial authority that their system of shamanism could not, and that the rulers of the other two powers clearly enjoyed. Cambridge historian John Bury concurs: “There can be no question,” he says, “that the ruler was actuated by political motives in adopting Judaism. To embrace Mohammadanism would have made him the spiritual dependent of the Caliphs, who attempted to press their faith on the Khazars, and in Christianity lay the danger of his becoming an ecclesiastical vassal of the Roman Empire. Judaism was a reputable religion with sacred books which both Christian and Mohammadan respected; it elevated him above the heathen barbarians, and secured him against the interference of Caliph or Emperor.” [Bury, A History of the Eastern Roman Empire, p. 406.]

According to an ancient document entitled King Joseph’s Reply to Hasdai ibn Shaprut, Joseph (a later Khazarian king) stated that, “From that time on the Almighty God helped him [King Bulan] and strengthened him. He and his slaves circumcised themselves and he sent for and brought wise men of Israel who interpreted the Torah for him and arranged the precepts in order.” [Brook, The Jews of Khazaria, p. 126.]

Well, there appears to be as many historical accounts as to how King Bulan was converted to Judaism as there are historians and mystics to present them. Many of them involve visions of angels, such as the tale by a Sephardic Jewish philosopher detailing a dream in which an angel told the king that his “intentions are desirable to the Creator” but the continued observance of shamanism was not. [Yehuda HaLevi, The Kuzari (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1998), p. 1.] In the aforementioned document, King Joseph’s Reply, its author claims that in that same dream God promised King Bulan that if he would abandon his pagan religion and worship the only true God that He would “bless and multiply Bulan’s offspring, and deliver his enemies into his hands, and make his kingdom last to the end of the world.” It is believed by scholars that the dream was designed to simulate the Covenant in Genesis and meant to imply “that the Khazars too claimed the status of a Chosen Race, who made their own Covenant with the Lord, even though they were not descended from Abraham’s seed,” says Koestler. [Koestler, The Thirteenth Tribe, p. 66.]

Overnight an entirely new group of people, the warlike Khazars, suddenly proclaimed themselves Jews — adoptive Jews. The Khazar kingdom began to be described as the “Kingdom of the Jews” by historians of the day. Succeeding Khazar rulers took Jewish names, and during the late 9th Century the Khazar kingdom became a haven for Jews of other lands. Significantly, as speculated upon by the noted Russian archaeologist Mikhail Artamonov, author of History of the Khazars (the book which, unfortunately, is available only in Russian), the sudden and unprecedented Khazar acceptance of Judaism as their new religion was actually the result of a carefully-planned Jewish coup d’etat, which at the same time not only reduced the Kagan to a mere figurehead but turned over all the real power to a new co-ruler called the Bek! As Koestler writes, all “the affairs of state including leadership of the army, were managed by the Bek (sometimes also called the Kagan Bek), who wielded all effective power.” Thus, the ancient Khazar system of government became a ‘double kingship’, the Kagan representing divine, the Bek secular power.” [Koestler, The Thirteenth Tribe, p. 54.] Shortly thereafter, the Jews now having consolidated their power, they had the Khazars adopt the 22letter Hebrew alphabet as well as their language, and even convinced them to submit to circumcision!

The Jews themselves fully understand their Khazarian heritage, as the third edition of the Jewish Encyclopedia for 1925 records: “Chazars: a people of Turkish origin whose life and history are interwoven with the very beginnings of the history of the Jews of Russia.”

If not for the fact that at least 95% of the world’s Jews are probably descendants of Khazar converts, this event would merit little further discussion. But since most Jews hail from Eastern Europe and Russia, we are in no position whatsoever to ignore this extraordinary conversion. Therefore, it is extremely important to look into the Khazars in some detail.

Of the ferocity and warlike tendencies of the Khazars there is little doubt and much historical evidence, all of it pointing to a group of people so violent in their dealings with their fellow men that they were feared and abhorred above all peoples in that region of the world. Legends and stories abound that center around Alexander the Great and his attempt to enclose the Khazars and quarantine them, due to their violent and barbaric nature, from the rest of the civilized world. This endeavor apparently failed. Some legends even claim they were cannibals. [Those were mentioned in Andrew Collin Gow’s book, The Red Jews (Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1995), pp. 40-41.] After the kingdom’s conversion to Judaism, the term “Red Jews” came into usage out of the superstition of medieval Germans, who equated their red hair and beards and their violent nature with deceit and dishonesty. And, as I said, it is also well documented that they heavily taxed those passing through their lands, for none dared refuse them.

It is not difficult to determine some of the motivating factors behind the legendary Khazar ferocity in war. “When the bek [the Khazar head of the military and second in command only to the Kagan himself] sends out a body of troops, they do not in any circumstances retreat. If they are defeated, every one who returns to him is killed. ... Sometimes he cuts every one of them in two and crucifies them and sometimes he hangs them by the neck from trees.” [Douglas M. Dunlop, The History of the Jewish Khazars, p. 113.]

Tribute by conquered peoples has always been a feature of empires, of course, but not in the fashion of the Khazars. The so-called great empires of the world always gave something in return for the taxes they extracted. Rome, for example, made citizens of those they conquered; and in return for the taxes they levied, they brought civilisation, order and protection against attack from would-be invaders. But not so in the Khazar Empire. The people who were subject to the Khazars received only one thing in return for their payments of tribute, and that was a shaky promise — the Khazars would refrain from further attacks and pillage so long as the tributes were paid. Therefore, the subjects of the Khazar Empire were nothing more than the victims of the giant protection racket. The Khazar overlords were therefore resented universally and bitterly throughout their domain, but they were also feared because of the merciless way in which they dealt with anyone who stood up to them.

The Khazarian kingdom reached its peak of power and world influence in the latter half of the eighth century. But then a new factor appeared on the scene.

The death knell of their empire was eventually seen in the dragon-headed ships of the Vikings who were to cross and navigate all the major waterways in their onslaughts.

In the midst of the rise of Khazars, a new Nordic power entered the fray — the Norsemen. As early as the 6th Century, these tall blond Germanic tribesmen, emerging from Scandinavia, had started to establish settlements along the Baltic Sea and had sent expeditions into central Russia up the western Dvina River. Attack by the Khazars upon the Slavic tribes led the latter to call upon their Nordic Scandinavian cousins for help. By the end of the 8th Century the Norsemen had built fortified settlements at Novgorod and Kiev and had set up smaller trading posts further down south, into Khazar territory.

The Norsemen, who called themselves Varangians, mixed with the Indo-European remnants in western Russia, the Alans and parts of the original Slavs. The Alans had originally called themselves the As, and a leading clan amongst them was known as the Rukhs-As (the “shining” or “leading” Alans). This tribe was the very last Indo-European tribe who emerged from the Caucasus region just before it was overrun and destroyed by the Mongols. From the Rukhs-As developed a tribal name, the Rus. After a while the Norsemen also began taking on the customs of these original Indo-Europeans, eventually calling themselves the Rus. It is from this time that the word Russia originated.

Like other Vikings, the Rus were bold adventurers and fierce fighters, but when they tangled with the Khazars, the Rus often ended up paying tribute like everyone else. The Khazars attacked the Rus without warning.

Initially taken aback by the ferocity of the Khazar attack, the Rus called for re-enforcements from Scandinavia. The call was answered by Rurik, ruler of southern Jutland and Friesland in Denmark, who set off for the steppes of Russia with an army, arriving in 856 AD. It is from this date that the Russians formally count the history of their country as having started. In 862 Rurik founded the city of Novgorod, and the Russian nation was born.

With two other Vikings, Dir and Askold, Rurik gained the kingship of the city of Kiev and successfully organized the defense of the territories belonging to these two city states. The Rus Vikings settled also among the Slavonic tribes under Khazar domination, and the struggle between Vikings and Khazars changed in character. It became a struggle by the emerging nation of Russia for independence from Khazar oppression.

Rurik had already established a reputation as a warrior — in the West he would have been called a Viking (as indeed many of his compatriots who went west on their forays, were called). Rurik had in the interim become king of the city Novrogod, and led the emerging Rus successfully until his death in 879 AD.

His successor was the Norwegian born Oleg (Old Norse name Helgi, Khazarian form: Helgu). He was a relative (likely brother-in-law) of Rurik. Oleg (or the Varangian Helgi) was entrusted by Rurik to take care of both his kingdom and his young son Ingvar, or Igor, until he grew up. Rurik, before his death, asked Oleg to rule the country and take care of Igor

Oleg fulfilled Ruric’s will. Oleg gradually united the principalities of Novrogod and Kiev and then started expanding the territory under the control of the Rus. Kiev (previously held by two other Varangians, Askold and Dir) was incorporated into a new united state in 882 AD. Prince Oleg moved the capital of Rus from Novgorod to Kiev.

The new capital was a convenient place to launch a raid against Constantinople. He gathered a sufficient army by 907 AD and had a successful campaign against Byzantium. The campaign resulted in an exceptionally advantageous trade treaty, signed a little bit later, in the year 911. Oleg also subdued and incorporated many neighboring tribes, launching raids into the Khazar held territory in the south.

To protect his vast possessions, Oleg started developing towns in the southeastern frontier. The Khazars had used to raid Russia from there, but Oleg defeated them several times and for some period of time Russia was out of danger. Oleg has gone down in history as one of the best Kievian princes.

A legend is connected with the death of Oleg, which became the basis of Pushkin’s Song of Oleg. According to a legend recorded by Pushkin in his celebrated ballad, setting out for a campaign against the Khazars, Oleg met a soothsayer in the forest who, in Pushkin’s version of the legend, told him: “The death-wound shall come from thy good battle steed.” It was prophesied by this pagan priests that Oleg would take death from his horse. Though he loved the horse very much, Oleg ordered it be taken away and kept it far away from him. Several years passed and Oleg found out that the horse had died. He came to the place where the dead horse was left, of which only bones remained. He was sad over the horse and at the same time glad that he had escaped the prophecy. But while he was standing deep in thoughts over the bones, a venomous snake emerged from the horse’s skull and bit Oleg. Says Pushkin:

“From the skull of the charger a snake, with a hiss

Crept forth as the hero was speaking: Round his legs, like a ribbon, it twined its black ring; And the Prince shrieked aloud as he felt the keen sting.”

The prophet was right. Oleg died, thus fulfilling the prophecy. In Scandinavian traditions, this legend lived on in the saga of Orvar-Odd. Two funerary barrows have been known as Oleg’s graves, one in Ladoga and another in Kiev. “And Oleg became known as prophetic,” — with these words the author of the Primary Chronicle ends his narration about him.

Oleg’s successor, prince Igor, ruled Kievian Russia from 913 until his death in 945. Our knowledge of him comes from Greek and Latin, in addition to Russian, sources. Igor had to fight the Drevliane as well as to maintain and spread Kievian authority in other East Slavic lands.

Igor’s sudden death left his widow Olga in charge of the Kievian state, for their son Sviatoslav was still a boy. Olga used the opportunity to become the first woman in to rule in Russian history. In 957 she made a journey to Constantinople, where she was warmly received by the emperor Constantine Porphyrogentus and where she was baptized as a Christian. However Olga’s conversion did not mean a conversion of her people or her son Sviatoslav.

In 962 AD, Olga abdicated in favor of her son, Svyatoslav, the first prince of the house of Rurik to have a Slavic name. The ten years of Sviatoslav’s rule of Kievian Russia, 962 to 972 AD, have been called “the great adventure”. Sviatoslav stands out in history as a classic warrior-prince: simple, severe, brave, sharing with his men uncounted hardships as well as continuous battles.

A fierce warrior who adhered strictly to his Scandinavian upbringing — even refusing to become a Christian after his mother had converted — Svyatoslav set as his first task the destruction of the Jewish Khazar empire in the south. In 965, the Rus army under Svyatoslav, crashed through the Khazar borders and utterly defeated the Jewish slave trading empire forever.

The Rusian Chronicle recorded the conquest of one major Khazar city, Sarkel, as follows:

“Svyatoslav went to the Oka and the Volga [rivers], and on coming into contact with the Vyatichians [a Slavic tribe] he asked them to whom they paid tribute. They answered that they paid a silver piece per plowshare to the Khazars. When they [the Khazars] heard of his approach, they went out to meet him with their prince, the kagan, and the armies came to blows. When the battle thus took place, Svyatoslav defeated the Khazars and took their city of Byelaya Vyezha.”

On having defeated the Khazars, Svyatoslav completed the unification of the East Slavs around Kiev. Also he brought under Russian control the great Volga-Caspian trade route, which had always been of peculiar importance. Svyatoslav even challenged the Byzantine Empire. The new emperor, the famous military leader John the Tzimisces, had become fully aware of the new danger. On having overwhelmed a rebellion in Asia, he shifted his main effort to the Balkans and finally defeated the Russians. Sviatoslav was forced to sign a peace treaty on the conditions that he abandons the Balkans and promise not to challenge the Byzantine Empire again in the future. On his way home, with a small retinue, he was attacked and killed by Byzantium forces. According to the Primary Chronicle, the Pecheneg khan headman that killed Sviatoslav had a drinking cup made out of Sviatoslav’s skull. The great adventure had come to its end.

A remarkable Russian historian Karamzin wrote: “Svyatoslav deserves the admiration of a poet and also the reproach of a historian.”

Upon Svyatoslav’s death, his kingdom passed to his youngest son, Vladimir. Over a century after the founding of Russia’s first city, another momentous event took place. Russia’s leader, Prince Vladimir of Kiev, accepted baptism and became a Christian in the year 989 AD. Vladimir also made his newly-acquired Christian faith the state religion of Russia replacing the pagan worship formerly practiced in Russia since it was founded in 820 A.D. He actively promoted Christianity in Russia, and his memory is revered by Russians today as “Saint Vladimir”; and so a thousand years ago Russia’s tradition as a Christian nation began. Vladimir’s conversion also brought Russia into alliance with Byzantium. During Vladimir’s reign (980-1015) Kievian Russia reached it’s height in many realms and became one of the strongest and culturally most developed countries in Europe.

THE DECLINE OF THE KHAZARS AND THE EMERGENCE OF THE ASHKENAZIM:

The swan song of the Khazar kingdom was actually not a precipitous decline in a climactic or decisive series of battles, but rather a gradual, evolutionary succumbing to superior forces over a protracted period of time. The Khazar kingdom was shattered, and the kingdom of the Khazars fell into decline. Like the Semitic Jews some 1000 years earlier, the Khazar Jews became dispersed. The kingdom of the Khazars was no more.

In the historical documents, after the destruction of the Khazar Empire, individual Jews are mentioned only in Kiev (about 1160) and Chernigov (1181). The Zionists (yes, I will call them Zionists) remained unpacified and, in 1175, organized a conspiracy which included the killing of Prince Andrey Bogolyubskiy. Many Jews were slaughtered in response to this and the Russian princes, meeting at an assembly, resolved no longer to admit Jews to Russia. There were no more

Zionists (or any Jews, for that matter) in Russia until the time of Catherine the Great. Eventually most of the Khazar Jews migrated to other areas. Many of them wound up in eastern Europe. The American People’s Encyclopedia for 1964 at 15-292 records the following reference to Khazars:

“In the year 740 A.D. the Khazars were officially converted to Judaism. A century later they were cursed by the in-coming Slavic-speaking people and were scattered over central Europe WHERE THEY WERE KNOWN AS JEWS. It is from this grouping that most German and Polish Jews are descended, and they likewise make up a considerable part of that population now found in America. The term Ashkenazim is now applied to this ... division.”

Students of Khazar history have long been interested in the fate of the Khazars after the collapse of their empire in the 10th century. This is a difficult topic to research. Not unexpectedly, this topic is highly charged, since a primary Khazar origin for the Ashkenazic Jews would invalidate the Zionist thesis that the contemporary Jews are largely of Palestinian Semitic origin and are more deserving of Palestine than the indigenous Palestinian Arab population.

As I said in the begining, the Khazar-Jews are also known by the name “Ashkenazim.” Under the heading “ASHKENAZI, ASHKENAZIM,” The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia provides population statistics for the Ashkenazim:

ASHKENAZI, ASHKENAZIM: ... constituted before 1933 some nine-tenths of the Jewish people (about 15,000,000 out of 16,500,000) [as of 1968 it is believed by some Jewish authorities to be closer to 100%].

Again, Arthur Koestler’s book was the first to blew the lid off this suppressed fact. Koestler notes that “In the 1960’s, the number of the Sephardim was estimated at 500,000. The Ashkenazim, at the same period, numbered about eleven million. Thus in common parlance, Jew is synonymous with Ashkenazi Jew.” [Thirteenth Tribe, p. 181]

“About 92 percent of all Jews or approximately 14,500,000 are Ashkenazim.” [The Universal Jewish Encyclopedia] And, today even Encyclopedia Americana admits that “The Khazars are believed to be the ancestors of most Russian and Eastern European Jews).” [Encyclopedia Americana (1985)]

These quotes clearly illustrates the Jews’ position regarding their ancestry. The Jews recognize that their genetic lineage is primarily from the TurkishMongolian Khazars rather than from the lineage of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. The Khazars adopted the religion of Judaism between the seventh and ninth centuries; this conversion gave rise to their false claim of being Judahites when in fact they have no historical or racial basis for doing so. The Khazars’ and their modern-day descendants’ claim to being Jews is strictly religious.

In the early Middle Ages there were no significant numbers of Jews and no Jews in leading positions in Europe, except perhaps Muslim Spain. There may have already been a small population of what Koestler calls “real Jews” living in Europe, but there can be little doubt that the majority of modern Jewry originated in the migratory waves of Khazars who play such a dominant part in early history of Russia.

Abraham N. Poliak, Tel Aviv University’s Professor of Mediaeval Jewish History, wondered at “how far we can go in regarding this [Khazar] Jewry as the nucleus of the large Jewish settlement in Eastern Europe. The descendants of this settlement,” Poliak declares, “those who stayed where they were, those who emigrated to the United States and to other countries, and those who went to Israel — constitute now the large majority of world Jewry. [A. N. Poliak, Khazaria — The History of a Jewish Kingdom in Europe (Mossad Bialik, Tel Aviv, 1951).] Some historians, such as Austrian orientalist Hugo Kutschera, assert that Eastern European Jewry was not part, but entirely of Khazarian origin. [Koestler, The Thirteenth Tribe, p. 169.] “The strangest fact is that the name of the Ashkenazim, the bulk whom I see as the descendents of the Khazars,” writes Hugo Kutschera, “points towards the old grounds of the Khazars around the Caucasus. ... According to the explanation by the Talmud, Ashkenaz thus means a country near the Black Sea between Ararat and the Caucasus, within the original region of the Khazar empire. The name with which the Sefardim indicate their co-religionists from Poland already gives the explanation for the real descent, from the countries in the Caucasus.” [Hugo Freiherr von Kutschera, Die Chasaren: Historische Studie (Vienna: A. Holzhausen, 1910).] This, again, is precisely the geographic locality of the Khazarian empire.

The Ashkenazim spread northwards into Russia, and then westwards into the rest of Europe. This gradual dispersion of the Khazar (or Ashkenazim) Jews up into central Russia and across into the rest of Europe and eventually beyond is described by Michael Rice in his book, False Inheritance, in these words:

In time, the Khazars disappeared as a distinct entity, but by that time Judaism was firmly planted amongst a large number of peasants, smallholders and modest townsfolk living in southern Russia. Gradually some of their surplus populations drifted westwards, settling in most of the eastern European cities, though the original communities had tended always to be strongly peasant in character. They came to represent an important stratum in the lineage of the Ashkenazi Jews, having migrated into Poland, Lithuania and Hungary.

In an article “The Jewish Kings of Russia” from the Jewish magazine Shabbat Shalom, Robert C. Quillan elaborated upon the Khazar Jews: “the Jews of Poland and eastern Europe are of largely Khazar Jewish, rather than Semitic Jewish origin,” and “Because many American Jews trace their lineage to these countries,” many scholars have concluded that this “disturbs the concept of a chosen people [from today’s Jews] extending back to Abraham.” H. G. Wells, in his Outline of History, reached the same conclusion: “The main part of Jewry never was in Judea and had never come out of Judea.” On September 10, 1985 in an address to the Cornell Club of Washington, D.C., Jewish author Dr. Alfred M. Lilienthal revealed that the Khazar-Jewish connection has been verified by many prominent anthropologists:

Many [modern-day Jews] of whom have clamored to go back [to

Palestine] never had antecedents [physical ancestors] in that part of the

world....

The overwhelming majority of Jews are descendants from the

converts of Khazaria and elsewhere who adopted Judaism.... This view of

the non-ethnicity of the largest portion of Jewry is sustained by such

prominent anthropologists as Ripley, Weissenberg, Hertz, Boas, Pittard,

Fishberg, Mead and others.

Arriving at the obvious conclusion that the Ashkenazi Jews were not Semitic, Dr. Lilienthal wrote: “These ‘Ashkenazim [Khazar] Jews’ (the Jews of Eastern Europe), ... have little or no trace of Semitic blood.”

And as I said, all of the previous quotations are documented as true and historically accurate in the remarkable book The Thirteenth Tribe by the well-known Jewish author, Arthur Koestler. Following is one of the many admissions made by Mr. Koestler about the true ancestry of today’s Jewish people: ... genetically they [today’s Jews] are more closely related to the Hun, Uigur and Magyar tribes than to the seed of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Should this turn out to be the case, then the term “anti-Semitism” would become void of meaning. Random House advertised Koestler’s book quite extensively; they began some of their ads with the headline: “WHAT IF MOST JEWS AREN’T REALLY SEMITES AT ALL?”

The Jews admit that they are not the descendants of the Ancient Israelites in their writings. Under the heading “A Brief History of the Terms for Jew,” in the 1980 Jewish Almanac, is the following: “Strictly speaking it is incorrect to call an ancient Israelite a “Jew” or to call a contemporary Jew an “Israelite” or a “Hebrew.” [1980 Jewish Almanac, p.3] This is a remarkable admission. Read it again and let it really sink in!

As the Khazars moved and lived amongst other people, the Khazar Jews passed on a distinct heritage from generation to generation. One element of the Khazar (or Ashkenazi) Jew heritage is a militant form of ZIONISM. “It was among Ashkenazi Jews,” says the Encyclopedia Americana, “that the idea of political Zionism emerged, leading ultimately to the establishment of the state of Israel. ... In the view of Khazar Jews, the land occupied by ancient Israel is to be retaken — not by miracle but by armed force. This is what is meant by Zionism today, and this is the force that created the nation which calls itself Israel today.

The other major ingredient of the Khazar Jew heritage is hatred for the Russian people. Russia is viewed as the force which caused the ancient so-called empire of the Jews, the Khazar empire, to collapse. Having once dominated much of what is present-day Russia, the Khazar Jews still want to reestablish that domination — and for a millennium they have been trying continually to do just that.

So they moved to Poland. Under Boleslaw III Krzywousty (1102-1139), the Jews, encouraged by the tolerant régime of this ruler, settled throughout Poland, including over the border into Lithuanian territory. According to Koestler’s estimation about half million Khazars moved to Poland-Lithuania, which amount would about correspond the estimated size of the Jewish population in the area. “The first Jews to settle in Lithuania in the 11th century came from the land of the Khazars. When the Khazars were overrun by the Mongols and Russians, the Jews settled in Lithuania, whose rulers, at that time, were extremely tolerant.” [Sidney

L. Markowitz, What You Should Know About Jewish Religion, History, Ethics and Culture (New York, NY: Citadel Press, 1955).] The Prince of Cracow, Mieczyslaw (Mieszko) III (1173-1202), in his endeavor to establish law and order in his domains, prohibited all violence against the Jews, particularly attacks upon them by unruly students (żacy). Boys guilty of such attacks, or their parents, were made to pay fines as heavy as those imposed for sacrilegious acts.

Actually, as early as the 10th century the Jews were already quite influential in Poland, and by the 12th century they were well enough entrenched to even monopolize the coinage of Poland’s money. Says the Jewish Encyclopedia: “Coins unearthed in 1812 in the Great Polish village of Glenbok show conclusively that in the reigns of Mieszko, Casimir, and Leshek, the Jews were, as stated above, in charge of the coinage of Great and Little Poland.” [Funk & Wagnall’s Jewish Encyclopedia, vol. 10, page 56] It is interesting to note that these coins bore Hebraic as well as Polish inscriptions.

From the various sources it is evident that at this time the Jews enjoyed undisturbed peace and prosperity in the many principalities into which the country was then divided. In the interests of commerce the reigning princes extended protection and special privileges to the Jewish settlers. In 1334, Casimir III the Great (1303-1370) amplified and expanded Boleslaw’s old charter with the Wislicki Statute. Casimir was especially friendly to the Jews, and his reign is regarded as an era of great prosperity for Polish Jewry. His improved charter was even more favorable to the Jews than was Boleslaw’s, insofar as it safeguarded some of their civil rights in addition to their commercial privileges. He regarded the Jews not simply as an association of money-lenders, but as a part of the nation, into which they were to be incorporated for the formation of a homogeneous body politic. For his attempts to uplift the Jews, Casimir was surnamed by his contemporaries “King of the Jews.”

Now, I should at least briefly mention also Lithuania which is from where I am myself. Lithuania was first mentioned in 1009 AD, formed a state in 1183 AD, and developed into a powerful empire in the 14th century. It expanded beyond the boundaries of the initial area of Lithuanian settlement, acquiring large parts of former Kievan Rus. It covered the territory of present-day Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, Transnistria and parts of Poland and Russia during the period of its greatest extent in the 15th century. It survived and gained power in the constant fight with the Teutonic Knights who were supported by almost the whole of Catholic Europe. I’m very proud to say that Lithuanians were the last among Europeans to become Christians.

Vytautas was one of the most famous rulers of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Grand Duke from 1401-1430. He was the cousin of Jogaila, who became King of Poland as Władysław II. In Lithuania, Vytautas is revered, and is a national hero. Vytautas is still one of the most popular first names for boys. Vytautas Magnus University was named after him.

As a result of the marriage of Lithuanian duke Jogaila (Jagiello in Polish) to Jadwiga, daughter of Louis I of Hungary, Lithuania was united with the kingdom of Poland. Jogaila became King Wladislaus II. He was christened and then converted Lithuania to Christianity one year later. This laid the foundation for the future Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania. Jogaila’s successors went on to successfully expand their political influence all throughout the 15th Century. Under the Lublin Union in 1569, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania federated into the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. In this federation, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania had a separate government, laws, army, and treasury. So, now, rights were extended to Lithuanian Jews as well...

Here, by the way, I should mention a very peculiar people called the Crimean Karaites that are also known as Karaims and Qarays. They are a community of ethnic Turkic adherents of Karaite Judaism. Originally centered in Crimea, Karaims were established in Lithuania and also in a few places elsewhere in Europe from medieval times. Their origin is a matter of great controversy. Some regard them as descendants of Khazars (unlikely) or Kipchak (more likely) converts to Karaite Judaism. Modern Karaims seek to distance themselves from being identified as Jews, emphasizing what they view as their Turkic heritage and claiming that they are Turkic practitioners of a “Mosaic religion” separate and distinct from Judaism. Whatever their origin, from the time of the Golden Horde onward, they were present in many towns and villages throughout Crimea and around the Black Sea. In 1392 Grand Duke Vytautas of Grand Duchy of Lithuania relocated one branch the Crimean Karaites to Lithuania where they continued to speak their own language. The Lithuanian Karaites settled primarily in Vilnius and Trakai. The Karaims in Lithuanian territory were granted a measure of autonomy. Today, the Statistics Department of Lithuania carried out an ethno-statistic research “Karaims in Lithuania” in 1997. It was decided to question all adult Karaims and mixed families, where one of the members is a Karaim. During the survey, i.e beginning 1997 there were 257 Karaim nationality people, 32 among them were children under 16.

The most prosperous period for Polish Jews began following this new influx of Jews with the reign of Zygmunt I (1506–1548), who protected the Jews in his realm. His son, Zygmunt II August (1548–1572), mainly followed in the tolerant policy of his father and also granted autonomy to the Jews in the matter of communal administration and laid the foundation for the power of the Kahal, or autonomous Jewish community. This period led to the creation of a proverb about Poland being a “heaven for the Jews”... Under the rule of King Stephen Bathory (1575-86) Jews were granted a Parliament of their own, which met twice a year and had the power to levy taxes.

Thus, the Khazar Jews, far from being destroyed by the devastating invasions of their Russian homeland, had instead entered into a new and prosperous chapter in their history — in Poland.

It was during this period that the Jews developed their new language: Yiddish. It sounds like German, but that’s not because the Polish Jews came from Germany. No, it’s because German Christians came from Germany, actively recruited by the King of Poland to immigrate to Poland, bringing their relatively advanced culture with them. And, immigrate they did — in large numbers, having been given tremendous incentives to do so. Most of the important business transactions in Poland during this time were conducted by German Christians or Khazar Jews, and everyone who wanted to prosper had to have some ability to understand German, Hebrew, and Slavic. These were the key elements which went into the formation of the Yiddish language; truly a language of expedience during that period.

Poland was the home for more Jews than any other place in the world. After being expelled from other areas of Europe in the mid-1300’s, Jews were allowed by the ruling nobles to immigrate to feudal Poland. There, despite modern Jewish itemization of alleged Polish persecutions over the centuries, the Jewish community flourished. (Just before World War II, “84% of all the Jews in the world either lived in historically Polish territory, or came from families that had lived there.” [Sherwin, p. 157])

The history of Poland for the next three centuries revolves around the struggle for supremacy between the native Polish people and the Jews. During the greater part of that time Poland was more or less dominated by the Jews — a situation most beneficial to all, according to Jewish history books. But when, as occasionally happened, there was a lapse in Jewish fortunes, these same histories are replete with accounts of gentile cruelty to the “chosen people of God”. And because these laments have been repeated often enough and loudly enough there is a widely held belief that Poland has been a land of oppression for Jewry... In my opinion, that’s is a nonsense. It has been the unhappy fate of Poland to be saddled for the greater part of its history with a large proportion of the world’s Jewish population. This, more than anything else, accounts for the tragic disunity which has kept Poland from taking its place among the great nations of the earth.

The Jews in sixteenth-century Poland were made estate agents, sent out to the outlying properties of the nobility to govern the serfs and produce revenue for the lords. This the Jews prospered so well that when the Polish and Lithuanian crowns were joined, the Jews moved into Lithuania, followed up with their “services.” The Jews reached their zenith of wealth and social importance when around 1600 the Polish nobility opened up the frontier region of the Ukraine. With Polish expansion into the Ukrainian frontiers, Jews leased land there too from the aristocracy, and ruled over the population of serf-slaves.

“Jews,” writes Witold Rymankowki, “in contrast to the millions of serfs and the impoverished townspeople who were oppressed by the nobility, constituted a privileged group which ... effectively represented the only class in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth to concentrate finance and liquid assets in its hands.” [Polonsky, Antony, Ed. From Shtetl to Socialism: Studies from Polin. The Litman Library for Jewish Civilization, London, Washington, 1993, p. 156] An old Latin proverb proclaimed that the Polish Commonwealth was “heaven for the nobles, purgatory for the townsfolk, hell for the peasants, and paradise for the Jews.” [William W. Hagen, Germans, Poles, and Jews: The Nationality Conflict in the Prussian East, 1772-1914 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 13]

Wealthy Jews established themselves securely throughout the Polish economy and farmed out work and management opportunities to relatives and coreligionists. “During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,” says Jewish historian Salo Baron, “domestic commerce (in Poland and Lithuania) as well as export (timber, grain, furs) and import (cloth, wine, luxuries) were for the most part in Jewish hands.” [Salo W. Baron, in Economic History of the Jews, edited by Nahum Gross (New York: Schocken Books, 1976), p. 227] In fact, another Jewish historian, Heinrich Graetz, states that “circumstances were such at the time that the Jews of Poland could form a state within a state.” [Heinrich Graetz, Popular History of the Jews (New York: Hebrew Publishing Company, 1949), vol. 5, p. 10.]

For their part, the peasants were in a despicable state. In Poland the aristocracy’s complete control over commoner lives was legalized with statutes in 1496, 1518, 1532, and 1543, whereby the poor were formally rendered as human chattel living “under conditions of virtual slavery as cheap laborers for the noble’s farmstead economy.” [Encyclopedia Britannica, vol. 25, p. 949]

“The Jewish arendator [leasee of land, mills, inns, breweries, tax farming, etc.],” writes Norman Davies, “became the master of life and death over the population of entire districts and, having nothing but a short-term and purely financial interest in the relationship, was faced with the irresistible temptation to pare his temporary subjects to the bone. On the noble estates, he tended to put all his relatives and co-religionists in charge of the flour mill, the brewery, and in particular the Lords’ tavern, where by custom the peasants were obliged to drink. On the church estates, he became the collector of all ecclesiastical dues, standing by the church door for his payment from tithe-payers ... the baptized infant, newly-weds, and mourners ... The Jewish community became the symbol of social and economic exploitation.” [Norman Davies, God’s Playground: A History of Poland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), p. 444]

“The Jewish steward,” adds seminal Jewish historian, Heinrich Graetz, “strove to draw as much as possible from the manors and to exploit the peasants as much as possible.” [Graetz quoted in Abram Leon, The Jewish Question: A Marxist Interpretation (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970), p. 192] “Jews,” notes historian Hillel Levine, “sometimes even managed whole villages and oversaw the economic development and exploitation of forests, mines, mints, custom houses, toll roads, and breweries on the gentry’s estates, using serf labor ... Jews were motivated ... to squeeze profits out of the margins. These included more rigorous supervision of the serfs and more efficient collection of rents and taxes, adding to the harshness of the serfs’ lives and by no means making the Jewish arendator [lessee of a business enterprise from the lords] beloved.” [Hillel Levine, “To Shame a Vision,” in Jack Nusan Porter and Peter Dreier, eds., Jewish Radicalism: A Selected Anthology (New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1973), p. 63] Jewish scholar Chaim Bermant notes:

“In Poland, the Jews became so numerous, prosperous and entrenched, that they began to lose something of their caution. Their whole economy was based mainly on the arenda system under which they became tax farmers and collectors for the crown, or lessees of the forests, estates, mills and salt mines of the nobility. Some operated on a large scale, many on a small scale, leasing a few acres of land, or operating a small distillery or tavern, but their utility to their superiors rested in their powers of extraction. The peasantry, the work force, the cattle, the land, were all regarded in much the same light and were pressed for their maximum yield, and if the nobility were thus the ultimate exploiters, the Jews were the visible ones and aroused the most immediate hostility. Rabbis warned that Jews were sowing a terrible harvest of hatred, but while the revenues rolled in the warnings were ignored. Moreover, the rabbis themselves were beneficiaries of the system.” [Chaim Bermant, The Jews (Times Books, 1977), p. 26]

The Jews were rewarded in various ways, but one benefit stands out. The Jews were given a monopoly on the on alcohol distribution throughout most of Poland, including the Ukraine. Only they had a license from the nobility for retail liquor sales, and they held long-term leases on the taverns in the peasant villages. Whenever a Polish or Ukrainian peasant wanted his shot of vodka, he had to buy it from the Jewish tavern owner, whose markup in this monopoly situation was lucrative. The Jews sang, in their Yiddish language, “Shicker is a goy ... trinker muss er.” (The Gentile is a drunkard; he has to drink.) [Norman F. Cantor, The Sacred Chain: The History of the Jews (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1994), p. 183] This meant that the person who regularly demanded tax payments from such peasant “slaves,” the person who managed the land and made decisions upon which the impoverished peasants were exploited, the person who dragged the peasant’s child away, the man who drove the peasant into deeper debt, and the man who sold the peasants booze to drink away their misery, all had a Jewish face. In the mid-eighteenth century, in rural areas of parts of Eastern Europe, up to 85% of the Jewish population “was involved in some aspect of manufacturing, wholesaling, or retailing of beer, mead, wine, and grain-based intoxicants, like vodka.” [Hillel Levine, “To Shame a Vision,” in Jack Nusan Porter and Peter Dreier, eds., Jewish Radicalism: A Selected Anthology (New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1973), p. 9]

Jews were visibly distinct from the rest of the population, especially by dress. They usually wore black and the men were distinguished by side locks over their ears. They also ‘“stood out by specific mannerisms,” says Polish historian Janusz Tazbir, “their nervous gestures, continually emphasizing the spoken word, and their characteristic feverish haste.” The Jew was to a Christian “an economic rival, an onerous creditor, accused of arrogance and impudence ... and willing to suffer any humiliation for even a small gain.” They were widely perceived as cowards and swindlers who held “occupations that did not deserve to be called ‘work.’“ [Tazbir, Janusz. Images of the Jew in the Polish Commonwealth. (in Polonsky, FR. SHT), p. 27-31]

The Polish landowners in Ukraine sold to the Jews the right to make use of their lands with all that they contained by way of humans and animals. The lessees of the land, by paying the landowner the sum laid down in the agreement, extorted from the Ukrainians a considerably larger amount — for themselves. The extent of the oppression was truly incredible. “The Ukrainians had a right to resent the Jews, if not to kill them. The Jews were the immediate instrument of the Ukrainians’ subjection and degradation,” admits Jewish historian Norman Cantor [Norman F. Cantor, The Sacred Chain: The History of the Jews (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1994), p. 184]

The Polish and Ukrainian Jews first felt large scale retribution for their self-aggrandizing policies on the backs of the Ukrainian poor in 1648. It is a particularly accursed year in both Jewish and Polish history, but is considered a heroic one of rebellion in Ukraine. It is also the date of the beginning of an event sometimes referred to in Jewish history as their “Third Great Catastrophe.” Tens of thousands of Ukrainian Cossacks, led by Bogdan Khmielnitsky, rose up against Polish noble domination and engaged in a vindictive orgy of vengeance and murder throughout the Ukraine and Poland. During the uprising of Bogdan Khmelnitskiy, many Jews, along with the Poles and Polish Christian priests, were slaughtered in the cruelest fashion. Well, the ordinary Jewish people suffered for the sins of their Zionists.

The catalyst was when Chmielnicki came home one day to find his home confiscated by a Polish noble, one of his sons killed, and his fiancée kidnapped. From his personal rage Chmielnicki forged a unified revolt amongst his people against the suffocating aristocracy. And Jews, omnipresently exploitive appendages of aristocratic oppression as land managers, tax collectors, financial advisors, tavern owners and merchants were soon to bear the wrath and fury, full force, of Cossack revenge. “[The Cossacks] first attacked the soldiers of the Polish nobles and the Jewish communities settled on their estates, and which frequently served as their estate managers.” [Revolt and the Peasant, p. 161] The Polish people at-large, however, may have borne up to ten times the Jewish number of casualties.

In this time of mysticism and overly formal rabbinism came the teachings of Israel ben Eliezer, also known under the title of the “Master of the Good Name” (the Ba’al Shem Tov, abbreviated as the Besht), (1698–1760), which had a profound effect on the Jews of Eastern Europe and Poland in particular. His disciples taught and encouraged the new fervent brand of Orthodox Judaism based on Kabbalah known as Hasidism.

Early on, a serious schism evolved between the Hasidic and non-Hasidic Jews. The Hasidim dubbed European Jews who rejected the Hasidic movement as Mitnagdim. The Vilna Gaon, the head of the Mitnagdim was the most famous opponent of Hasidism. At one point Hasidic Jews were put in cherem (a Jewish form of communal excommunication); after years of bitter acrimony, a rapprochement occurred between Hasidic Jews and those who would soon become known as Orthodox Jews. The reconciliation took place in response to the perceived even greater threat of the Haskala, or Jewish Enlightenment. Since then Orthodox Judaism, and particularly Haredi Judaism, has subsumed all the sects of Hasidic Judaism.

The rise of Hasidic Judaism within Poland’s borders and beyond had a great influence on the rise of Haredi Judaism (or Jewish religious Zionism) all over the world, with a continuous influence that has been felt from the inception of the Hasidic movements and its dynasties by famous rebbes, including the Aleksander Hasidism, Bobov Hasidism, Ger Hasidism, Nadvorna Hasidism, and Sassov Hasidism, among others. More recent rebbes of Polish origin include Rabbi Schneersohn, the head of the Chabad Lubavitch Hasidic movement, who lived in moved Lubavitch movement from Poland to the United States.

June 16, 2006

Last time we finished with how fundamentalist Judaism, which is religious basis of Zionism, was born in Jewish Shtetls of Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania among the Khazar (or Ashkenazi) Jews, in 18^th century. Then it rapidly spread to other places and now we have it prominently present even here in Eugene, as Chabad movement.

For six hundred years, Poland had served as a refuge for the Jews and given them land and freedom, while other European nations expelled Jews. In Poland, they even had their own Jewish Sejm (parlament) and their own courts of law. As I just said, Poland even allowed the Jews to fleece their subordinates freely. And what did the Jews pay to Poland in return for this? Well, it’s believed that the Zionists, in large part, organized the partitioning of Poland.

Why did they do that? Well, because they wanted to penetrate Russia and eventually to take revenge for the destruction of their Khazar kingdom. Remember that poisonous snake that appeared from horse’s skull and stung Prince Oleg?

As a result of the three partitionings, in 1772, 1776 and 1796, Poland was divided between Prussia and Russia and thus ceased to exist as a nation.

The third partition of Poland was an event of paramount significance in Russian history because as a by-product of the partition Russia acquired the world’s largest Jewish population. From this moment on Russia’s history became hopelessly intertwined (again!) with what many would call, yes, the Khazar Jewish problem, and eventually, as we will see in next part of this presentation, the Jewish Supremacists/Zionists brought about the downfall of Russia.

But no one can possibly understand the nature of Russia’s communism, nor of Zionism, without some knowledge of the situation existing in Russia in the century preceding the October revolution of 1917.

I just told you about the presence of Khazar Jews in Poland. But whereas Poland had invited the Jews to settle in vast numbers within its boundaries in the 13th, 14th, and 15th centuries, the Imperial Russian government had permitted no such immigrations, and had in fact sealed its borders to them. As would be expected, therefore, the Imperial government was something less than enthusiastic over this sudden acquisition of Poland’s teeming masses of Jews. The law on not allowing Jews into Russia was broken without any prior arrangement. Can Catherine the Great have thought that matters would end in this way when reaching her agreement with the Zionists’ envoys on the partitionings of Poland?

Taking fright at what she had done, Catherine then restricted the settlement of Jews in Russia to the Pale of Settlement, but with reservations and exceptions. Some merchants of the first and second orders, persons with higher education, and certain other categories of Jews, were actually permitted to live outside the Pale of Settlement, and by applying sufficient cunning it was possible to make fairly extensive use of this... But, generally, from the very beginning the Tsarist government imposed a set of rather strict restrictions designed to protect Russia’s economy and culture from the inroads of the Jews.

It was decreed (in 1772) that Jews could settle in Greater Russia only in certain areas. Within this “Pale of Settlement” Jews were more or less free to conduct their affairs as they pleased. But travel or residence beyond the Pale was rigidly restricted, so that in 1897 (date of Russia’s 1st census) 93.9% of Russia’s Jewish population lived within its boundaries, and only 6% of the total resided in other parts of the Empire. To prevent smuggling, no Jew was permitted to reside within 50 versts of the border.

From the standpoint of Jewish history, the Pale of Settlement ranks as one of the most significant factors of modern times. Here within a single and contiguous area the greater part of Jewry had gathered, and was to remain, for something like 125 years. For the first time Jewry was subjected to a common environment and a common ground of experience. Out of this common experience and environment there evolved the Jews of the 20th century. Here too were born the great movements of modern Zionism and also Communism.

The Pale of Settlement extended from the Crimea to the Baltic Sea, encompassing an area half as great as western Europe. By 1917, seven million Jews resided there, comprising perhaps more than half the world’s total Jewish population. Yes, it was within the Pale of Settlement that the twin philosophies of Communism and Zionism flourished. Both movements grew out of Jewish hatred of Christian civilization (persecutor of the “chosen race”), and both movements have spread wherever Jews have emigrated. The Pale of Settlement has been the reservoir from which the world-wide forces of communism and Zionism have flowed.

It is worth noting that half of the world’s Jewish population now resides in the U.S., and that all but a handful of these are descendants of emigrants from the Pale which, again, means that their ancestors were Khazars and had absolutely nothing to do with Palestine.

Because Jews had always maintained a separate community (kahal) within host societies, the Pale can not be called abusive. It not only protected Russians from Jewish influence, but protected Jews from being kicked out by their hosts after Jewish influence was felt and despised.

Although Zionist propagandists have complained long and loudly of being oppressed by the Russian Imperial government, it is a fact that up until 1881 they prospered beyond all expectation. The Jews settled in the Russian economy like a swarm of locusts in a field of new corn. Very quickly they achieved a monopoly, for example, over Russia’s liquor, tobacco, and retail industries. Later they dominated the professions as well.

Jews continued to invest in and propagate alcohol, a product they themselves recognized was harmful and were disinclined to use themselves (short of ritual wine uses). By the late nineteenth century perhaps the largest brewery in Europe, Schultheiss-Patzenhofer, “was a ‘Jewish firm’ (in terms of management, Board membership, and financial links).” [Mosse, p. 12-13] In the Ukraine, by 1872, after the feudal system had passed into history, wealthy Jews owned about 90% of Ukraine’s distilleries, as well as 56% of its sawmills, 48% of its tobacco production, and 33% of the sugar refineries. [Subtleny, p. 277] In the Russian province of Zhitomir, 73.7% of the Jews living there made their living by leasing distilleries and selling alcohol at taverns. [Lindemann, Esau’s Tears, p. 152] Even in the Polish town of Oswiecim (renamed and known infamously as the Nazi site for the concentration camp Auschwitz) Jakob Haberfeld, a Jewish “liquor magnate” owned (up to the World War II era) the most beautiful building in the area — a 40-room mansion. [Goldman, A., 1998, p. A1]

Hayim Zhitlowsky was from the Jewish village of Uschah in what later became part of the Soviet Union. He was, as one Jewish historian puts it, “the outstanding thinker of the Jewish cultural renaissance in the Yiddish language in the twentieth century.” He was not some prejudicial, peasant anti-Semite; he was a lover of his own Jewish people, and influential in his community. But Zhitlowsky was deeply troubled by the omnipresent Jewish exploitation of their surrounding non-Jewish peasant neighbors. In 1883 he wrote:

“The Jewish businessman Samuel Solomovich Poliakov built railroads for Russia. Those railroads were, according to Nekrasov’s famous poem, built on the skeletons of the Russian peasantry. My uncle Michael in the [Jewish town of] Uschach distilled vodka for the Russian people and made a fortune on the liquor tax. My cousin sold vodka to the peasants. The whole town hired them to cut down Russian woods which he bought from the greatest exploiter of the Russian peasants, the Russian landowner.... Wherever I turned my eyes to ordinary, day-to-day Jewish life, I saw only one thing, that which anti-Semites were agitating about; the injurious effect of Jewish merchantry on Russian peasantry.” [In Cuddihy, p. 138]

Ber Borochov, a Jew, a socialist, and a Zionist, explained Jewish exploitation of non-Jews this way: “The vast majority of non-Jews gain their livelihood from nature ... whereas the majority of Jews earn their living directly from other men. In Russia and Galicia 70-80% of non-Jews earn their livelihood from nature; a similar percentage of the Jews earn theirs from men.” [Borochov, Ber. Nationalism and the Class Struggle. A Marxist Approach to the Jewish Problem. Poale Zion-Zeire Zion of America and Poale Zion Alliance of America, NY, 1937, p. 68]

As late as the 1800s, says Jewish scholar Howard Sachar, “the typical Russian peasant was bound in serfdom to his soil. Diseased, ignorant, hopelessly superstitious, he lived in a rude hut, slept in his clothes, and fed his fire with animal dung.” [Sachar, p. 80]

And what of the Jewish merchants and money lenders, and the Jews at-large, the people that kept to themselves and refused to interact with others except towards commercial profit, these people from whom many impoverished Gentiles sought out to borrow money, not to expand their fortunes, but merely to survive the current season? A Jewish author, Max Dimont says: “None of these restrictions applied to the Jews. They were free to come and go, marry and divorce, sell and buy as they pleased...” [Dimont, Max. Jews, God, and History. A Signet Book from New American Library, Times Mirror, 1962, p. 247]

Jews were visibly distinct from the rest of the population, especially by dress. They usually wore black and the men were distinguished by side locks over their ears. They also ‘“stood out by specific mannerisms,” says Janusz Tazbir, “their nervous gestures, continually emphasizing the spoken word, and their characteristic feverish haste.” The Jew was to a Christian “an economic rival, an onerous creditor, accused of arrogance and impudence ... and willing to suffer any humiliation for even a small gain.” They were widely perceived as cowards and swindlers who held “occupations that did not deserve to be called ‘work.’“ [Tazbir,

p. 27-31]

While Jews, yes, were sometimes prohibited from owning land (as were most other people), they could pay the owning nobles a flat fee to lease it; profits beyond this fee were theirs to keep. “The belief that Jews could not own land,” notes Albert Lindemann (who is professor of University of California, Santa Barbara), “ranks as one of the most often overheard simplifications about their status, both in Russia and elsewhere in Europe ... The real issue was not whether Jews could own land, if they would work it with their own hands, but whether they could own land that allowed them to exploit the labor of the peasants.” [Lindemann, Esau’s Tears, p. 63] As Jewish historian Howard Sachar admits, “agriculture held little if any attraction to them.” [Howard Morley Sachar, The Course of Modern Jewish History (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), p. 78]

Yuri Slezkine’s book The Jewish Century, which appeared last year to rapturous reviews, is an intellectual tour de force, alternately muddled and brilliant, courageous and apologetic. Slezkine’s greatest accomplishment is to set the historical record straight on the importance of Jews in the Bolshevik Revolution and its aftermath. He summarizes previously available data and extends our understanding of the Jewish role in revolutionary movements before 1917 and of Soviet society thereafter. His book provides a fascinating chronicle of the Jewish rise to elite status in all areas of Soviet society — culture, the universities, professional occupations, the media, and government. Slezkine himself is an immigrant from Russia and of partially Jewish extraction. Arriving in America in 1983, he moved quickly into elite U.S. academic circles and is now a professor at

U.C. Berkeley. Daniel Boyarin, Professor of Talmudic Culture at Berkeley, calls Slezkine’s new book “a brilliant addition to Jewish studies.” Here is what Professor Slezkine has to say:

The Jews had dominated the commercial life of the Pale for most of the nineteenth century. Jewish banks based in Warsaw, Vilna, and Odessa had been among the first commercial lending institutions in the Russian Empire (in the 1850s, Berdichev had eight active and well-connected banking houses). In 1851, Jews had accounted for 70 percent of all merchants in Kurland, 75 percent in Kovno, 76 percent in Mogilev, 81 percent in Chernigov, 86 percent in Kiev, 87 percent in Minsk, and 96 percent each in Volynia, Grodno, and Podolia. Their representation in the wealthiest commercial elite was particularly strong: in Minsk and Chernigov provinces and in Podolia, all “first guild” merchants without exception (55, 59, and 7, respectively) were Jews. Most were involved in tax-farming, money-lending, and trade (especially foreign trade, with a virtual monopoly on overland cross-border traffic), but the importance of industrial investment had been rising steadily throughout the century. Before the Great Reforms, most of the industry in western Russia had been based on the use of serf labor for the extraction and processing of raw materials found on noble estates. Originally, Jews had been involved as bankers, leaseholders, administrators, and retailers, but already in 1828-32, 93.3 percent of the nonnoble industrial enterprises in Volynia (primarily wool and sugar mills) were owned by Jews. Their reliance on free labor made them more flexible with regard to location, more open to innovation, and ultimately much more efficient. [Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), p.118]

Among Russia’s greatest financiers were Evzel (Iossel) Gabrielovich Gintsburg, who had grown rich as a liquor-tax farmer during the Crimean War; Abram Isaakovich Zak, who had begun his career as Gintsburg’s chief accountant; Anton Moiseevich Varshavsky, who had supplied the Russian army with food; and the Poliakov brothers, who had started out as small-time contractors and tax farmers in Orsha, Mogilev province. [The Jewish Century, p.119]

Several Jewish financiers from Warsaw and Lodz formed the first Russian joint-stock banks; Evzel and Horace Gintsburg founded the St. Petersburg Discount and Loan Bank, the Kiev Commercial Bank, and the Odessa Discount Bank; Iakov Solomonovich Poliakov launched the Don Land Bank, the Petersburg-Azov Bank, and the influential Azov Don Commercial Bank; and his brother Lazar was the main shareholder of the Moscow International Merchant Bank, the South Russia Industrial Bank, the Orel Commercial Bank, and the Moscow and Yaroslavl-Kostroma Land Banks. The father and son Soloveichiks’ Siberian Commercial Bank was one of Russia’s most important and innovative financial institutions. Other prominent Russian financiers included the Rafalovichs, the Vavelbergs, and the Fridlands. In 1915-16, when the imperial capital was still formally closed to all but specially licensed Jews, at least 7 of the 17 members of the St. Petersburg Stock Exchange Council and 28 of the 70 joint-stock bank managers were Jews or Jewish converts to Christianity. When the merchant of the first guild Grigorii (Gersha Zelik) Davidovich Lesin arrived in St. Petersburg from Zhitomir in October 1907 to open a banking house, it took a special secret police investigation by two different agencies to persuade the municipal authorities, who had never heard of him, to issue the licence. By 1914, Lesini’s bank had become one of the most important in Russia. [The Jewish Century, p. 119]

Nor was finance the only sphere of Jewish business expertise. According to the premier economic historian of Russian Jewry (and first cousin to Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin), Arcadius Kahan, “There was hardly an area of entrepreneurial activity from which Jewish entrepreneurs were successfully excluded. Apart from the manufacturing industries in the Pale of Settlement, one could have encountered them at the oil wells of Baku, in the gold mines of Siberia, on the fisheries of the Volga or Amur, in the shipping lines on the Dnepr, in the forests of Briansk, on railroad construction sites anywhere in European or Asiatic Russia, on cotton plantations in Central Asia, and so forth.” [The Jewish Century, p.120]

At the turn of the twentieth century, the Gintsburgs controlled a large portion of the Siberian gold industry, including the Innokentiev mines in Yakutia, Berezovka mines in the Urals, the South Altai and Upper Amur concerns, and largest of them all, the Lena goldfields (which they abandoned in 1912 after a scandal following the massacre of striking miners). [The Jewish Century, 2004), p.121]

In 1887 in Odessa, Jews owned 35 percent of factories, which accounted for 57 percent of all factory output; in 1900, half of the city’s guild merchants were Jews; and in 1910, 90 percent of all grain exports were handled by Jewish firms (compared to 70 percent in the 1880s). Most Odessa banks were run by Jews, as was much of Russia’s timber export industry. On the eve of World War I, Jewish entrepreneurs owned about one-third of all Ukrainian sugar mills (which accounted for 52 percent of all refined sugar), and constituted 42.7 percent of the corporate board members and 36.5 percent of board chairmen. In all the sugar mills in Ukraine, 28 percent of chemists, 26 percent of beet plantation overseers, and 23.5 percent of bookkeepers were Jews. In the city of Kiev, 36.8 percent of all corporate managers were Jews (followed by Russians at 28.9 percent). And in 1881 in St. Petersburg (outside the Pale), Jews made up about 2 percent of the total population and 43 percent of all brokers, 41 percent of all pawnbrokers, 16 percent of all brothel owners, and 12 percent of all trading house employees. Between 1869 and 1890, the proportion of business owners among St. Petersburg Jews grew from 17 percent to 37 percent. [The Jewish Century, p.122]

As elsewhere, the most popular careers [among the Jews] were those in law and medicine. In 1886, more than 40 percent of the law and medical students at the universities of Kharkov and Odessa were Jewish. In the empire as a whole, in 1889 Jews accounted for 14 percent of all certified lawyers and 43 percent of all apprentice lawyers (the next generation of professionals). According to Benjamin Nathans, “during the preceding five years, 22% of those admitted to the bar and an astounding 89% of those who became apprentice lawyers were Jews.” Jews constituted 49 percent of all lawyers in the city of Odessa (1886), and 68 percent of all apprentice lawyers in the Odessa judicial circuit (1890). In the imperial capital, the proportion of Jewish lawyers was variously estimated at 22 to 42 percent, and of apprentice lawyers, at 43 to 55 percent. At the very top, 6 out of 12 senior lawyers chosen in the mid-1880s to lead seminars for apprentice lawyers in St. Petersburg were Jews. [...] Between 1881 and 1913, the share of Jewish doctors and dentists in St. Petersburg grew from 11 and 9 percent to 17 and 52 percent. [The Jewish Century, p.125]

Well, I think it’s enough to understand how really “bad” the life for the Jews was in Russia at that time.

“[Jewish life] was certainly better than the life of the Russian peasant,” remarks Howard Sachar. [Howard Morley Sachar, The Course of Modern Jewish History (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), p. 215]

A historian of Lithuanian Jewry noted that in 1792 “all the trade and industry of Lithuania was controlled by this population.” [Mendelsohn, Ezra. Class Struggle in the Pale: The Formative Years of the Jewish Workers' Movement in Tsarist Russia. Cambridge, at the University Press, 1970, p. 2] “Nearly all the merchants of the Pale [of which Jews were 12% of the population],” says Howard Sachar, “were Jews ... [and] it was true that the Jews were exceptionally influential in the upper levels of commerce.” [Sachar, The Course of Modern Jewish History,

p. 212] By the turn of the twentieth century, estimates another scholar, three-quarters of the merchants of the Pale were Jewish, 88-96% of those in provinces like Grodno and Minsk, 82% of those in Western Galicia, and 92% in Eastern Galicia. [Heinze, Andrew R. Adapting the Abundance. Jewish Immigrants, Mass Consumption, and the Search for American Identity. Columbia University Press, NY, 1990, p. 185]

In the Pale of Settlement as a whole, ten to fifteen percent of the population was Jewish (the only comparable concentration outside of Russia was in Galicia, at eleven percent), but Jews were concentrated in much higher numbers in some areas. Bialystok’s population in the 1860s was approximately seventy-five percent Jewish, Moghilev’s, around ninety percent, and the population of Lodz also was overwhelmingly Jewish. By 1900 over half of the urban population of Lithuania and Byelo-Russia was Jewish. In Bessarabia (the province bordering on Romania, touching the Black Sea) and in Congress Poland the rate of growth of the Jewish population appears to have been about three times as fast that of the non-Jewish population. The southern cities of Kishinev and Odessa had populations that were fifty percent Jewish. Commonly, Jews made up over ninety percent of the business class in Russia’s cities. [Albert S. Lindemann, Esau’s Tears: Modern Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp.63-64]

This Jewish influence was everywhere oppressive, and now and then became an unbearable yoke. [P. Botkine, “A Voice for Russia,” Century Magazine, No. 45, February 1893, pp. 613-614, writing about Jews in Russia, quoted in Kevin MacDonald, Separation and its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998), p.42]

Eastern European Jews were also especially infamous in the nineteenth century for involvement in activities associated with the saloon, as pimps, or in the language of the time, in “white slavery,” but also in other illegal activities. A substantial Jewish subculture of criminality thrived in cities like Odessa and Bucharest. [Lindemann, Esau’s Tears, p.66]

In 1804 Tsar Alexander I gave permission for everyone to have an equal education, thereby evidently hoping to assimilate the Jewish community. Under the reign of Alexander I also many of the restrictions against residence “beyond the Pale” (one should recognize this popular saying) were relaxed, especially for the artisan and professional classes.

A determined effort was made to establish Jews in agriculture and the government encouraged at every opportunity the assimilation of Jews into Russian national life. What little knowledge he had of Zionists!

But in the second half of the nineteenth century it became utterly clear that the policy of assimilation and emancipation had failed. It simply didn’t work. Russian Jewry could not be convinced, cajoled, coerced, or torn away from their traditions of “separateness” and “uniqueness.” In spite of every conceivable repressive measure, notes Howard Sachar, “the Jews remained a cohesive mass, devoutly traditional in religion and occupation, a separate nation sticking like a bone in Russia’s throat.” [Sachar, The Course of Modern Jewish History, p. 84]

The Jews had not amalgamated with Russia, but had begun to crush her, firstly by making a fortune out of the genocide which, by means of alcohol, was being committed against the Russian, Ukrainian, Byelorussian, Lithuanian, and other nations, and secondly by seizing control of the finances, the courts of law, the taxation system, trade, industry, the press, education, etc.

The greatest Russian novelist, Fyodor Dostoevsky, whose treatise about the Jews is, even today, kept carefully hidden away by the co-called Western “free” publishing houses, wrote in 1877, in his Diary of a Writer, “In the very work the Jews do (the great majority of them, at any rate), in their exploitation, there is something wrong and abnormal, something unnatural, something containing its own punishment.” [Slezkine, The Jewish Century, p.156] “Their kingdom and their tyranny is coming,” Dostoevsky wrote. “The unlimited despotism of their ideology is now only beginning. Under this tyranny human kindness and neighborliness as well as the longing for justice will fade away; all Christian and patriotic ideals will perish for ever!” [Louis Marschalko, The World Conquerors: The Real War Criminals (London: Joseph Sueli Publications, 1958), p.50]

Here is Professor Slezkine again, about the prevalent attitudes among Russia’s Jews of that time, toward their Gentile neighbors:

Not only were goy (“Gentile”), sheigets (“a Gentile young man”), and shiksa (a Gentile [i.e., “impure”] woman) generally pejorative terms that could be used metaphorically to refer to stupid or loutish Jews; much of the colloquial Yiddish vocabulary dealing with goyim was cryptic and circumlocutory. According to Hirsz Abramowicz, Lithuanian Jews used a special code when talking about their non-Jewish neighbors: “They might be called sherets and shrotse (reptiles); the word shvester (sister) became shvesterlo; foter (father) foterlo; muter (mother), muterlo, and so on. Khasene (wedding) became khaserlo; geshtorbn (died) became gefaln (fell), geboyrn (born) became geflamt (flamed).” Similarly, according to M. S. Altman, when Jews of his shtetl referred to Gentiles’ eating, drinking, or sleeping, they used words normally reserved for animals. The Yiddish for the town of Bila Tserkva (“White Church”) was Shvartse tume (“Black filth,” the word tume generally denoting a non-Jewish place of worship). [Slezkine, The Jewish Century, p.108]

M. S. Altman’s grandmother “never called Christ anything other than mamser, or ‘the illegitimate one.’ Once, when there was a Christian procession in the streets of Ulla [Belorussia], with people carrying crosses and icons, Grandma hurriedly covered me with her shawl, saying: ‘May your clear eyes never see this filth.’“ [Slezkine, The Jewish Century, pp.108-109]

As World Zionist Congress President Nahum Goldmann stated regarding Jewish perceptions of Lithuanians early in the century, “The Jews saw their persecutors as an inferior race. ... Most of my grandfather’s patients were peasants. Every Jew felt ten or a hundred times the superior of these lowly tillers of the soil; he was cultured, learned Hebrew, knew the Bible, studied the Talmud — he knew that he stood head and shoulders above these illiterates.” [Nahum Goldmann, The Jewish Paradox (New York: Fred Jordan Books/Grosset & Dunlap, 1978), p. 13.]

Alexander’s successor, Tsar Nicholas I, was less inclined to favor Jewry, and in fact viewed their inroads into the Russian economy with alarm. He was much hated by the Jews.

Prior to his reign, Alexander I had allowed any male Jew the privilege of escaping compulsory military duty by paying a special draft-exemption tax. In 1827 Nicholas abolished the custom, with the result that Jews were for the first time taken into the Imperial armies... In 1844 Nicholas I further antagonized Jewry by abolishing the institution of the Kahal (Jewish self-rule, autonomy), and in that same year he prohibited by law the traditional Jewish garb, specifying that all Jews should, except on ceremonial occasions, dress in conformity with Russian standards. These measures, and many others like them, were aimed, again, at facilitating the assimilation of Jewry into Russian life. The Tsarist government was much concerned by the Jew’s failure to become Russian citizens, and viewed with hostility the ancient Jewish customs of maintaining a separate culture, language, mode of dress, etc. — all of which contributed to keep the Jew an alien in the land of his residence. It is to this determination to “Russianize” and “civilize” the Jew that we can ascribe the unusual efforts made by the Imperial government to provide free education to its Jews. As I said already, in 1804 all schools were thrown open to Jews and attendance for Jewish children was made compulsory. Compulsory education was not only a novelty in Russia, but in any country in the early 19th century. In Russia education was generally reserved for a privileged few, and even as late as 1914 only 55% of Russia’s population had been in school. The net result of the Imperial government’s assimilation program was that Russian Jewry became the best educated segment in Russia. This, well, eventually worked to the destruction of the Tsarist government...

Then, the reign of Alexander II marked the apex of Jewish fortunes in Tsarist Russia. In 1861 Czar Alexander II, the famous Liberator, had liberated 23,000,000 Russian serfs. From that moment the prospect of liberty and improvement opened out for Russian citizens of all nationalities (Russia contained about 160 nationalities and the Jews formed about 4 percent of the total population). By 1880, as Slezkine says, they were becoming dominant in the professions, in many trades and industries, and were beginning to filter even into government in increasing numbers. As early as 1861 Alexander II had permitted Jewish university graduates to settle and hold governmental positions in greater Russia, and by 1879 apothecaries, nurses, midwives dentists, distillers, and skilled craftsmen were permitted to work and reside throughout the empire.

Nevertheless Russia’s Jews were increasingly rebellious over the remaining restraints which still bound the greater part of Russian Jewry to the Pale of Settlement, and which, to some extent at least, restricted their commercial activities.

Moreover, with the emancipation of the peasant serfs in the 1860s and 1870s, Jewish socio-economic life was changing; aristocratic-linked privileges including complete self-autonomy were eroding. “The commercial monopoly of the Jews declined,” notes Abram Leon, “in the degree that the peoples whose exploitation had fed it, developed.” [LEON, p. 136]

Herein lay the dilemma; the Imperial government could retain certain of the restrictions against the Jews, and by doing so incur their undying hostility, or it could remove all restraints and thus pave the way for Jewish domination over every phase of Russian life. Certainly Alexander viewed this problem with increasing concern as time went on.

Alexander II lost a considerable amount of his enthusiasm for liberal causes after an attempt was made to assassinate him in 1866. He dismissed his “liberal” advisors and from that time on displayed an inclination toward conservatism. This is not to say he became anti-Jewish, but he did show more firmness in dealing with them.

Then, in 1876 a secret society, Land and Liberty, was formed. The group was led by Mark Natanson. In October, 1879, the Land and Liberty split into two factions. The majority of members, who were Jewish and favored a policy of terrorism, established the People’s Will (Narodnaya Volya). Others, such as George Plekhanov, who wasn’t Jewish, formed Black Repartition (Chernyj Peredel), a group that rejected terrorism and supported a socialist propaganda campaign among workers and peasants. Jews were to be found in both factions and played a substantial role in the formation and activity of both organizations. Indeed, not only Aaron Zundelevich and Mark Natanson but Jewish activists in general contributed significantly to the evolution of People’s Will and Black Repartition. [Erich Haberer, Jews and Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p.148] With the establishment of Narodnaya Volya the “Jewish mission” of infusing Russian revolutionary Populism with a party-political dimension complementing, if not transcending, its social-revolutionary fixation had been accomplished. [Haberer, Jews and Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Russia, p.171]

Despite the obvious presence of Jews in Chernyj Peredel, it has been argued that Jews qua Jews were more attracted to Narodnaya Volya because political terrorism was more congenial to Jewish participation than the theory and practice of traditional Populism. In this view — most forcefully put forth by Elias Tscherikower — the new political orientation and its urban-centred terrorist activity significantly “broadened the range of possibilities for Jewish revolutionaries — both psychologically and factually.” Factually, it provided Jews with the unprecedented opportunity to be active in an urban environment that was much more conducive to their natural abilities and national characteristics: instead of acting as propagandists in the name of an alien ideology in an alien peasant environment, they now were able to partake in activities where their Jewishness was less of a liability than previously. Without feeling a sense of inferiority, without necessarily divesting themselves of their Jewish traits, as Narodovoltsy they could participate fully and effectively in the sort of work for which they were ideally suited as Jews. In short, their characteristically Jewish abilities of “underground organization” and “technical know-how” were a real asset readily appreciated and sought after by their Russian comrades. Psychologically, Narodnaia Volia provided Jews with a political rationale for revolutionary action that was much more in tune with their experience of Jewish rightlessness than Populist abstractions of social revolution. [Elias Tscherikower, “Yidnrevolutsionern in rusland in di 60er un 70 er yorn,” in HS, 3 (1939), pp. 135, 13132, 135-36., quoted in Haberer, Jews and Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Russia, p.173] Tscherikower offers a better explanation in arguing that, psychologically, the new atmosphere of political terrorism was much more appealing to Jews than the old apolitical varieties of Populist socialism. [Erich Haberer, Jews and Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p.174]

As previously, but now on a much larger scale, they excelled in maintaining the movement’s “underground” as its proverbial “practitioners and technicians of revolution.” [Elias Tscherikower quoted in Haberer, Jews and Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Russia, p.186]

The person that comes to mind most readily is Aron Zundelevich, “the most Jewish Jew among Jewish revolutionaries,” who, says Tscherikower, “surely chose for himself intentionally the party-name ‘Moishe’.” [Tscherikower quoted in Haberer, Jews and Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Russia, 1995), p.174] In him the Jewish motif was never far below the surface, and repeatedly came to light in situations which forced him to reveal his sense of Jewish identity and loyalty.

In Russian revolutionary history the eventful years of 1879-81 inaugurated what is generally known as the decade of Narodnaya Volya. While Chernyj Peredel was fighting for its survival, Narodnaya Volya initiated a string of terrorist operations which culminated in the assassination of Alexander II in 1881.

When the People’s Will decided to assassinate Alexander II, first they attempted to use nitroglycerine to destroy the Tsar train. The Moscow railroad explosion of 19 November 1879 was part of Narodnaya Volya’s first systematic, though unsuccessful, assassination project against the Tsar. Three Jews were directly involved: Savelii Zlatopolskii, Grigorii Goldenberg and Aizik Aronchik. The project was designed to kill Alexander II on his return trip by rail from the Crimea to St. Petersburg by mining the tracks at three different locations: near Odessa, Alexandrovsk, and Moscow. However, the terrorist miscalculated and it destroyed another train instead. An attempt the blow up the Kamenny Bridge in St. Petersburg as the Tsar was passing over it was also unsuccessful. The next attempt on Alexander’s life involved a carpenter who had managed to find work in the Winter Palace. Allowed to sleep on the premises, each day he brought packets of dynamite into his room and concealed it in his bedding. He constructed a mine in the basement of the building under the dinning-room. The mine went off at half-past six at the time that the People’s Will had calculated Alexander would be having his dinner. However, his main guest, Prince Alexander of Battenburg, had arrived late and dinner was delayed and the dinning-room was empty. Alexander was unharmed but sixty-seven people were killed or badly wounded by the explosion.

The People’s Will contacted the Russian government and claimed they would call off the terror campaign if the Russian people were granted a constitution that provided free elections and an end to censorship. On 25th February, 1880, Alexander II announced that he was considering granting the Russian people a constitution. To show his good will a number of political prisoners were released from prison. Count Michael Tarielovitch Loris-Melikoff, the Minister of the Interior, was given the task of devising a constitution that would satisfy the reformers but at the same time preserve the powers of the autocracy.

Nevertheless, the People’s Will began to make plans for another assassination attempt. In 1881 a plot hatched in the home of the Jewess, Hesia Helfman, was successful.

On 1st March, 1881, Alexander II was travelling in a closed carriage, from Michaelovsky Palace to the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg. An armed Cossack sat with the coach-driver and another six Cossacks followed on horseback. Behind them came a group of police officers in sledges. All along the route he was watched by members of the People’s Will. On a street corner near the Catherine Canal terrorists threw their bombs at the Tsar’s carriage. The bombs missed the carriage and instead landed amongst the Cossacks. The Tsar was unhurt but insisted on getting out of the carriage to check the condition of the injured men. While he was standing with the wounded Cossacks another terrorist threw his bomb. Alexander was killed instantly and the explosion was so great that terrorist himself also died from the bomb blast. Alexander II was blown up and so ended an era.

The Czar Alexander II was actually so loved by the common Russian people (because he was such a reformer) that after his death there was built an incredibly beautiful church right on the spot where he was murdered and that church was given the name “Spas na Krovi”, which means “Saviour on Blood.” The church is one of the most beautiful buildings I have ever seen, and if you ever happen to visit St. Petersburg that should be on the very top of your list of must-see places. Meanwhile, I picked some beautiful photos of that church, so you could see them now and realize what Zionists in Russia were bound to destroy: all the beauty and spirit of the unique Russian civilization.

Now, what, in fact, was the Jewish role in the terrorism of Narodnaya Volya during its most volatile period of activity in 1879-81? What precisely was the contribution of Jews to the terrorism of Narodnaya Volya, which claimed the life of Alexander II in 1881 and frightened the Russian government throughout the 1880s?

The conventional answer has been that Jews contributed next to nothing to the momentous surge of Populist terrorism. Commenting on the Russian government’s antisemitic rationale in blaming Jews for the assassination of Alexander II on 1 March 1881, Salo Baron stated: “Although the terrorists included only one Jewish woman, Gesia Helfman, whose contribution had consisted merely in providing shelter for her fellow conspirators, officially inspired rumours were spread that Jews had played a leading part in the revolutionary upheaval.” [S. W. Baron, The Russian Jews under Tsars and Soviets (New York, 1976), p. 44.] Aside from the fact that there is no evidence for those “officially inspired rumours,” Baron’s statement is grossly misleading, both in describing Helfman’s contribution and in giving the appearance that her supposedly modest role was sufficient for official opinion to hold Jews responsible for the revolutionary unrest.

As Narodnaya Volya’s most reliable and capable keeper of conspiratorial quarters, Helfman had been in charge of managing the operational base for the 1 March attempt. [Haberer, Jews and Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Russia, p.198] As R. M. Kantor wrote, it was therefore in “the preparation and speedy execution of this terrorist act ... that Helfman made a vital contribution within her unique sphere of competence.” [Kantor, Gesia Gelfman (Moscow, 1926), p. 25, quoted in Haberer, Jews and Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Russia, p.198]

The assassination of Alexander II on 1 March 1881 was the momentous event, the final result of two years of systematic terrorist activity that witnessed Jewish participation in almost all its facets, calls for an assessment of the role of Jews in a party committed to regicide. [Haberer, Jews and Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Russia, p.198]

To tell the whole story it is best to return to late 1879, when Jewish participation in Narodnaya Volya terrorism began, and, consequently, trace the role of Jews in its various stages which led one and a half years later to the killing of the Tsar. The activity of Aron Zundelevich, again, offers a convenient point of entry to this chapter in the history of Jews in the revolutionary movement. [Haberer, Jews and Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Russia, pp.187-188] The role of Zundelevich in utilizing dynamite for revolutionary purposes has been confirmed by several of his contemporaries. Grigorii Gurevich states that he and his comrades in the Berlin circle “knew that Arkadii had bought dynamite from somewhere and had brought it to St Petersburg.” This, he claims, “was the first dynamite which the revolutionaries received in Russia.” Lev Deich goes so far as to attribute to Zundelevich alone the idea of using the newly invented explosive for terrorist objectives. “To Zundelevich,” he writes, “belongs the initiative to replace knives and revolvers with dynamite and bombs which, due to his efforts, began to be produced by home-made methods in Russia itself.” Though essentially true, these statements must be qualified in several respects. [Haberer, Jews and Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Russia, pp.188-189] In the first place, Zundelevich did not buy dynamite in large quantities but only procured samples to enable his comrades in Russia to manufacture high-quality dynamite themselves. Secondly, Zundelevich himself indicated that when he and others sought new, more effective weapons of terrorism, it was Sergei Kravchinskii who, upon his request, conducted experiments in the Swiss mountains to test the efficacy of dynamite and other explosives. Communicating his findings, Kravchinskii confirmed Zundelevich’s own preference for dynamite which, he told him, “corresponds best with the targets singled out for terrorist acts.” Reassured that dynamite was the “right stuff,” Zundelevich used his contacts in Switzerland to secure samples for the terrorists’ “laboratory” in St Petersburg. Thus, aside from promoting the introduction of dynamite into the revolutionary struggle, Zundelevich also helped to initiate the actual home-made production of the “elegant and slender bombs.” [This phrase belongs to Adam Ulam, Name of the People, ch. 13)] Of course, the “dynamite business” was merely one of the many tasks which Zundelevich performed in his capacity as “chief contrabandist” and “minister of foreign affairs.” [Haberer, Jews and Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Russia, p.189]

The role of Iokhelson, Zundelevich, Tsukerman, and Helfman in manning Narodnaya Volya’s underground does not, of course, exhaust the Jewish contribution to the functioning of its techno-organizational infrastructure during 1879-81. Other outstanding activists in this respect were Grigorii Mikhailovich Fridenson (1854-1913), Aizik Aronchik, Grigorii Goldenberg, and the Zlatopolskii brothers, Savelii and Lev. The latter two participated in preparations to blow up the Tsar. Savelii assisted Vera Figner in planning the November 1879 attempt to mine railroad tracks in Odessa. Lev, who had a reputation for “extraordinary mathematical talent” and “inventive technical originality,” applied his theoretical know-how to the second Odessa mining in April-May 1880. Fittingly known by his nickname Mekhanik, he not only advised Sofia Perovskaia (who was in charge of the assassination team) on how to tunnel and mine a major Odessa thoroughfare, but also participated directly in building the subterranean explosive device. [Haberer, Jews and Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Russia, p.195]

It would be misleading, however, to describe the Jewish role in Narodnaya Volya merely in terms of “secondary functions,” and to claim moreover, as Tscherikower has done, that this role was a modest one (a besheydene) since Jews were “located basically between the leaders of the party and the direct perpetrators of terrorist acts.” “The strength of the Jewish revolutionary,” he argues, “lay altogether in different spheres: he was a pioneer of party-building, a great practitioner and technician of revolution.” [Tscherikower quoted in Haberer, Jews and Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Russia, p.200]] Much of this is true of course. But, as such, his role was neither “modest” nor always “secondary.” As intermediaries between the party’s Executive Committee and its rank and file, the Jewish Narodovoltsy occupied an important position in the propagation and organization of political terrorism.

Though highly prejudiced in its assertion that Jews, along with Poles, were the mainspring of the revolution, the tsarist government obviously had a case in blaming “Jewish nihilists” for the wave of terrorism that had rocked the ship of state since 1878-79 and even claimed its captain in 1881. In some ways, and in spite of their exaggerations, its officials had a more accurate appreciation of the role of Jews in the terrorist movement than the revolutionaries themselves or historians who joined them in down-playing the Jewish contribution. ... This, in turn, produced a new strain of anti-Semitism that had terrible consequences for the Jews of Russia.” [Haberer, Jews and Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Russia, pp.200-201]

The making of this new antisemitism was correctly identified by the Soviet Jewish historian Yuri Gessen when he wrote that “the 1870s gave rise to a new motif — the Jews are harmful and dangerous [due] to their political revolutionary activity.” [Gessen, Istoriya, 2, p. 212., quoted in Haberer, Jews and Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Russia, p. 201] If previously they were considered harmful for the economic and moral well-being of society because of their “exploitation” of the native population and their religious “fanaticism” which offended Christian sensibilities, they now assumed also the reputation of being a politically subversive element. Three years later, the Vilna chief of police was more explicit. In connection with the June 1875 destruction of the first Vilna circle, he declared: “Until now we considered you Jews only swindlers; now we will consider you also rebels.” [Erich Haberer, Jews and Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p.201]

Up to 1881 Russian policy had consistently been directed in an attempt to “Russianize” the Jews, preparatory to accepting him into full citizenship. In line with this policy, free and compulsory education for Jews had been introduced, repeated attempts had been made to encourage them to settle on farms, and special efforts had been made to encourage them to engage in the crafts. Now Russian policy was reversed. Hereafter it became the policy of the Imperial government to prevent the further exploitation of the Russian people by the Jews. Thus began the death struggle between Tsar and Jews.

The assassination of Alexander II, the first event of a similar series, was the first major success of the revolutionary Zionists in preventing Jewish emancipation. It restored the ideal condition depicted by Moses Hess (one of the earliest Zionist propagandists) in the year following the liberation of the serfs: “We Jews shall always remain strangers among the nations; these, it is true, will grant us rights from feelings of humanity and justice, but they will never respect us so long as we place our great memories in the second rank and accept as our first principle, ‘Where I flourish, there is my country’.” [Quoted in Douglas Reed, The Controversy of Zion (Durban, South Africa: Dolphin Press, 1978), p.196]

During this period Leon Pinsker, another herald of Zionism, published his book Auto-Emancipation. The title was a threat (to the initiated); it meant, “We will not accept any kind of emancipation bestowed on us by others; we will emancipate ourselves and will give ‘emancipation’ our own interpretation.” He said, “There is an inexorable and inescapable conflict between humans known as Jews and other humans”, and he described the master-method to be used to bring about this “self-emancipation” and to “restore the Jewish nation”: the struggle to achieve these ends, he said, “must be entered upon in such a spirit as to exert an irresistible pressure upon the international politics of the present.” [Quoted in Reed, The Controversy of Zion, p.196]

The reaction to the assassination of Alexander II was, of course, instantaneous and far reaching. There was a widespread belief in and out of the government, that if the Jews were dissatisfied with the rule of even Alexander II — whom many people in Russia and abroad had described as “the most benevolent prince that ever ruled Russia” — then they would be satisfied with nothing less than outright domination of Russia.

All through 1881 there was widespread anti-Jewish rioting all over the empire. Riots against Jews began in 1881 after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II; the fact that there was a Jewish member (Gessia Gelfman) in the assassin’s group enflamed already existing negative public opinion against Jews. [Lowe, Sanford. What Jesus Did or Did Not Say: A New Scholarly Portrait Reveals the Roots of Antisemitism. Moment. April 1994, p. 59] Among the most reported Russian anti-Jewish pogrom sites at the turn of the century was Kishinev. (This incident led to the creation of the Jewish lobbying agency, the American Jewish Committee in 1903). Chaim Weitzmann, another Zionist activist and the first President of the state of Israel, wrote to a member of the wealthy Jewish Rothschild family (instrumental in funding early Jewish settlements in pre-Israel Palestine): “Eleven years ago ... I happened to be in the cursed town of Kishinev ... In a group of about 100 Jews we defended the Jewish quarter with revolvers in our hand, defended women and girls ... We slept in the cemetery — the only safe place and we saw 80 corpses brought in, mutilated dead...” “Thus Weizmann,” says Albert Lindemann, “reports that he personally saw eighty mutilated corpses in a single place, when the death toll for the entire city was later generally recognized to be forty-five. But there is another problem with the account he provides. It is pure fantasy. Weizmann was in Warsaw at the time.” [Lindemann, Esau’s Tears, 1997), p. 164] Lindemann shows in detail how the Jews deliberately exaggerated their losses in the pogrom and how through biased scholarship, continuing to the present day, they have tried to foster the myth that Czarist authorities were responsible for inciting the pogroms. [After the Kishinev “pogrom”] Jewish sources initially reported over 700 dead, but ... as even a friendly American reporter recognized, some of the atrocities initially reported simply did not occur, and some Jews made false claims in hopes of getting relief money from western Europe and America. [Michael Davitt, Within the Pale: The True Story of AntiSemitic Persecution in Russia (New York, 1903), pp. 240-1, quoted in Lindemann, Esau’s Tears, 1997), p.291]

Judeo-centric history, however, is only interested in the martyrological legends of its tribe and largely focuses on the seminal 1881 rioting/pogroms against Jews which spread into 8 provinces and 240 communities in parts of Russia. As Jewish scholar Michael Aronson notes, however, “The number of cases of rape and murder (one of the highest estimates refers to 40 dead and 225 rapes in 1881) seems relatively low by twentieth-century standards. But this did not prevent the stormy events of 1881-84 from having a deeply shocking and long-lasting impact on [largely Jewish] contemporaries.” [Michael Aronson, Troubled Waters: The Origins of the 1881 Anti-Jewish Pogroms in Russia (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990), p. 61] For Jews, especially in the West, the attacks upon Jewish communities merely informed, and confirmed, convictions of Jewish innocence and the specialness of their unique suffering within their religiously-based martyrological tradition. But, as Chaim Bermant notes, Jewish innocense and passivity to Polish attack is not accurate:

“After the 1881 pogroms Jews began to organize self-defence units. In the late ‘eighties, for example, a large gang which set upon the Jews of Odessa found themselves confronted by Jewish bands, armed with clubs and iron-bars (and according to the police, fire-arms), and quickly drew back. The same happened in Berdichev and several other centres. Jews often gave as good as they got, even better on occasion, but their efforts were restricted by the police and the army, nominally there to keep the peace, but usually siding with the attackers. In August 1903, there was a pitched battle in the streets of Gomel between Jews, peasants and railway workers in which twelve Jews and eight Christians were killed and many hundreds were injured: much property was looted and destroyed. In a pogrom at Zhitomir which extended over three days in April 1905, ten Christians and sixteen Jews were killed — mainly through police action. On the third day of the fighting a crowd of about a thousand Jews made their way to the governor and warned that if their attackers were not called off they would embark upon a general slaughter. ‘Rivers of blood will flow. We will kill all Christians irrespective of their age, sex, class ...” [Chaim Bermant, The Jews (Times Books, 1977), p. 211]

The Russian or Polish side of the story in anti-Jewish “pogroms” in that country is never mentioned in mainstream Jewish history. As Tadeusz Piotrowski notes about violence against Jews, for example, in the towns of Kielce and Czestochowa, “the first was sparked by a massive demonstration involving 300 young Jews who marched up and down the town streets chanting: ‘Long live Lenin! Long live Trotsky! To hell with Poland!’ The second was precipitated by the shooting of a Polish soldier by a Jew.” [Tadeusz Piotrowski, Poland’s Holocaust: Ethnic Strife, Collaboration with Occupying Forces and Genocide in the Second Republic, 1918-1947 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 1998), p. 43]

Large numbers of Jews who had been permitted to settle beyond the Pale of Settlement were evicted. In May of 1882 the May Laws (Provisional Rules of May 3, 1882) were imposed, thus implementing the new governmental policy. The May Laws shook the empire to its foundations. The following passage is taken from Encyclopedia Britannica [page 76, volume 2, 1947]:

“The Russian May Laws were the most conspicuous legislative monument achieved by modern anti-Semitism ... Their immediate results was a ruinous commercial depression which was felt all over the empire and which profoundly affected the national credit. The Russian minister was at his wit’s end for money. Negotiations for a large loan were entered upon with the house of Rothschild and a preliminary contract was signed, when ... the finance minister was informed that unless the persecutions of the Jews were stopped the great banking house would be compelled to withdraw from the operation ... In this way anti-Semitism, which had already so profoundly influenced the domestic policies of Europe, set its mark on the international relations of the powers, for it was the urgent need of the Russian treasury quite as much as the termination of Prince Bismarck’s secret treaty of mutual neutrality which brought about the Franco-Russian alliance.”

Thus, within a period of 92 years (from the 3rd partition to 1882) the Jews, although constituting only 4.2% of the population, had been able to entrench themselves so well in the Russian economy that the nation was almost bankrupted in the attempt to dislodge them. And, as we have seen, the nation’s international credit was also affected.

After 1881 events served increasingly to sharpen the enmity of Russia’s Jewry toward Tsarism. The May Laws had not only restricted Jewish economic activity, but had attempted — unsuccessfully — to preserve Russia’s cultural integrity. Hereafter Jews were permitted to attend state-supported schools and universities, but only in ratio to their population. This was not unreasonable since Russia’s schools were flooded with Jewish students while large numbers of Russia’s population were illiterate, but to the Jews this represented another bitter “persecution,” and all the world was acquainted with the enormity of this new crime against Jewry...

On May 23rd a delegation of Jews headed by Baron Gunzberg called on the new Tsar (Alexander III) to protest the May Laws and the alleged discrimination against Jewry. As a result of the investigation which followed, Tsar Alexander issued an edict the following Sept. 3rd, a part of which I can read:

“For some time the government has given its attention to the Jews and to their relations to the rest of the inhabitants of the empire, with a view of ascertaining the sad condition of the Christian inhabitants brought about by the conduct of the Jews in business matters ...

During the last twenty years the Jews have gradually possessed themselves of not only every trade and business in all its branches, but also of a great part of the land by buying or farming it. With few exceptions, they have as a body devoted their attention, not to enriching or benefiting the country, but to defrauding by their wiles its inhabitants, and particularly its poor inhabitants. This conduct of theirs has called forth protests on the part of the people, as manifested in acts of violence and robbery. The government, while on the one hand doing its best to put down the disturbances, and to deliver the Jews from oppression and slaughter, have also, on the other hand, thought it a matter of urgency and justice to adopt stringent measures in order to put an end to the oppression practised by the Jews on the inhabitants, and to free the country from their malpractices, which were, as is known, the cause of the agitations.” [Elizabeth Wormeley Latimer, Russia and Turkey in the 19th Century (A. C. McClury & Co., 1895), p. 332.]

In 1896 the Russian state set up a liquor monopoly, depriving thousands of Jews of lucrative occupations, either as wholesale liquor merchants or as innkeepers. In many areas up to this time, the liquor trade had been important to Jewish economic survival. In the villages of Zhitomir province, for example, 73.7 percent of the Jews earned a living by leasing distilleries and selling the product at inns. [Ezra Mendelsohn, Class Struggles in the Pale: The Formative Years of the Jewish Workers’ Movement in Tsarist Russia (Cambridge, England, 1970), p. 2.] Not surprisingly, after the establishment of the state liquor monopoly, many Jews continued to produce and smuggle contraband alcohol, further swelling the ranks of Jewish criminals who found it necessary to bribe local officials to survive. [Lindemann, Esau’s Tears, p.289]

In 1887, the so-called “percentage rate” was introduced: the number of members of any ethnic group, or denomination as it was called at that time, who entered the institutions of higher education had to be proportionate to the number of members of that ethnic group living in the locality in question. One would think that this procedure prescribed a just uniformity for all nations. But the Zionists howled: “Antisemitism!” They were in any case also very dissatisfied with the State new monopoly on vodka.

It was in this atmosphere that the twin movements of Marxism and political Zionism began to take hold and dominate the mass of Russian Jewry. Modern Zionism, whose chief advocate was Theodore Herzl, took root in Russia in the 1880s in competition with Marxism, whose high priest was Karl Marx, also grandson of a rabbi ... Eventually every Russian Jew came to identify himself with either one or the other of these movements.

They took three decisions. The first was to go to America and strengthen Zionism there: Zionists had established a fairly firm grip on the United States by the middle of the 19th century. The second was to settle in the “Promised Land”. After lengthy debates they decided that this would be Palestine, their “historical homeland”. The third was, by overthrowing the Russian government and seizing power, to turn Russia herself into a sort of like “Promised Land” for the Jews. All these three paths were to be pursued in parallel. In addition, it was decided to wage a more clearly open struggle than previously: powerful and varied Zionist organizations were to be set up, employing not only their own, but also all the other, ideologies and tendencies.

Emigration to America received also a powerful impetus. A further one and a half million Jews had emigrated there by the end of the century. The Jews also began to take possession of Palestine. And as for Russia, many hours would be required to describe the activities upon which the Zionists were, and still are, engaged in Russia. I described them to you only briefly.

In particular, Zionists were to penetrate Russian society, in order to prepare for the seizure of power and for subsequent government. The world only actually began to notice Zionism after the “World Zionist Organization” (founded 1897) and a great number of other organizations had been created. There were some 500 such organizations in Russia alone by the time the revolution began. This served to make people think that the ideology and practice of Zionism were also created precisely at that time. But in reality the Zionists had merely come out into the open and were pursuing their activities legally. As we have said, Zionism has been putting its ideology into practice for three thousand years.

By the turn of the twentieth century a large Jewish population in Russia had grown and their principal agitation tended to be about “being Jewish.” “By far the most significant Jewish Marxist party was the Bund,” notes Lionel Kochan (who was one of Britain’s leading experts on the history of Central and Eastern Europe), “It far exceeded other Russian social democratic parties in size and influence.” [Lionel Kochan, East European Jewry Since 1770, p. 122]

As an outgrowth of this political fermentation, there appeared at the beginning of the 20th century one of the most remarkable terrorist organizations ever recorded in the annals of history. This was the Jewish dominated Social Revolutionary Party (Essers in Russian), which between 1901 and 1906 was responsible for the assassination of no less than six first ranking leaders of the Imperial government, including Minister of Education Bogolepov (1901); Minister of Interior Sipyagin (1902); Governor of city of Ufa Bogdanovich 1903); Premier Viachelav von Plehve (1904); Grand Duke Sergei, uncle of the Tsar (1905); and General Dubrassov, who had suppressed the Moscow insurrection (1906). Terrorism was regarded by the Socialist Revolutionary Party and its leaders to be of prime importance. As Oliver Radkey, professor of Russian history at University of Texas, has emphasized, the fortunes of the party were inextricably bound to terrorism. Chief architect of these terrorist activities was the Jew, Gershuni, who headed the “terror section” of the Social Revolutionary Party. In charge of the “fighting section” was Yevno Azev, son of a Jewish tailor, and one of the principal founders of the party.

The main terrorist organization of the Party was the so-called Combat Brigade (Boevaya organizatsiya), an autonomous group that was responsible only to the Central Committee. Because of the many applicants and the fact that requirements for membership were very stringent, it was difficult to gain admittance and members were carefully screened. One former member, the SR leader V. Zenzinov, writes: “Membership was considered a great honor because a member was entrusted with the good name and reputation of the party and he had to deserve it, to merit this great faith . . . I personally know of many persons who expressed the wish to join the Terrorist Brigade and were turned down.” Zenzinov estimates that the Brigade included about 78 persons altogether during the time of its existence (1902-1910).

Prominent member of the Brigade was Dora Brilliant, whose story gives some interesting insights into the psychology of the Jewish female terrorist. After being, exiled to Poltava for Participation in a student demonstration, Brilliant met Gershuni, the founder of the Terrorist Brigade, who apparently had a great influence on her. She joined the PSR in 1902 and in 1904 she was finally admitted into Terrorist Brigade. V. Levitskii (Tsederbaum), who knew her in Poltava, noted: “What was interesting about her were her deeply-set, dark eyes, which expressed some sort of inconsolable melancholy and grief. Someone aptly said that the age-old sorrow of the Jewish people was expressed in them.” Brilliant’s first terrorist undertaking was her participation in the plot to kill Pleve. To prepare for the assassination she and Savinkov, acting as husband and wife, rented a flat with two other fellow terrorists, who played the part of the servants. Brilliant pleaded incessantly with Savinkov to allow her to throw one of the bombs at Pleve, but he refused, insisting that as long as there were men available women should not actually commit terrorist acts.

Rahel Lurie, another member of the Terrorist Brigade, was similar to Brilliant in that she too longed to throw a bomb herself. According to Savinkov, “she believed in terror and considered it a duty and an honor to participate in it.” Terror became the focal point, their raison d’etre. The ultimate political and social goals were over-shadowed by the immediacy of the terrorist campaign and their participation in it. Mariya Shkol’nik, a young Jewish terrorist who participated in the plot to kill General Theodore Trepov, the governor of St. Petersburg, recalled in her memoirs: “The isolation and concentration on one idea affected me in a particular way. The world did not exist for me.”

Fruma Frumkina, a former Bundist, another Jewish woman whose obsession with terror became irrational. After her offer to commit a terrorist act had been rejected by the party, Frumkina decided to take her own initiative. In May, 1903, while serving a brief term in Kiev prison, Frumkina asked to speak with Novitskii, the Kiev a Chief of Police. After being admitted to his office she walked over and stabbed him with a small knife, wounding him only slightly. She was sentenced to a long period of hard labor for this, but her desire to carry out a terrorist act successfully had become an idée fixe. A letter written by her to Vladimir Burtsev, the editor of Byloe, reveals that to a large extent her terrorist motives stemmed from a deep desire to confirm her own importance as an individual: “I must confess that I have done very little. ... I have always been strongly enticed by the idea of carrying out a terrorist act. I have thought, and still think, only of that, have longed and still long only for that. I cannot control myself.” In 1907, while in a Moscow prison, Frumkina made another unsuccessful attempt to kill a prison official and was executed shortly thereafter.

Azev later plotted, but was unable to carry out, the assassination of Tsar Nicholas II. He was executed in 1909 and Gershuni was sentenced to life imprisonment. This marked the end of the terrorist activities of the party, but the effect of these political murders was far reaching. Never again was the royal family, or its ministers free from the fear of assassination. Soon another prime minister would be shot down — this time in the very presence of the Tsar. This was the backdrop for the first revolution of 1905.

We must for the moment turn our attention also to a group of revolutionary exiles who are important to this story because they and their disciples eventually became the rulers of Communist Russia. Head of this group, and the man who is generally recognized as Lenin’s teacher, was George Plekhanov, a gentile. Plekhanov had fled Russia in the 1880s and settled in Switzerland. There with the aid of Vera Zasulich, Leo Deutch, and Pavel Axelrod — all Jews — he had formed the Marxist “Group for the Emancipation of Labor”, and until 1901 was recognized as the leader of the group. Although Plekanov was himself not a Jew, those around him were, with a few exceptions, Jewish. One of the exceptions was Lenin, who first became a disciple of Plekanov, and later a competitor.

In carrying out their own decision, the Zionists entered upon the revolutionary movement in Russia on a massive scale. Of course, in all this they had been pursuing their own aims of subjecting these movements to the tasks of Zionism. I would say that the movement was simply hijacked by them.

At that time Leiba Davidovich Bronstein was already becoming active in the subversive movement of these radicals. Here you can see these early photos, including his parents (Yiddishe Mama, who gave birth to the most vicious monster in the history of humankind), and also his mug-shot for his criminal record, and one of the supporters of Trotsky was Alexader Parvus, who actually himself was a millionaire and in this photo you can see Trotsky and Parvus and another of their fellow revolutionaries in jail. But, no, of course I don’t want to imply that all subversives and terrorists in Russia at that time were exclusively only Jews. Although, as I said, the Jews made up the bulk of revolutionaries, or at least most active and most prominent members of that movement, but there were also quite a few “shabba goys” to help them. At that time, by the end of 19^th century, Vladimir Illych Ulyanov, who later became known as Lenin, was growing up and gaining status in the movement. But, hey, he was also a quarter Jewish. Now it’s a commonly known fact, although when I was in school in the former Soviet Union, it was a great secret. But her in the United states, it was known a long time ago.

In 1898, seizing the initiative from the Social Democrats in Russia, the Zionists organized the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party. It is to be noted that this was done immediately after the World Zionist Organization was created in 1897. Of the nine delegates present at the first conference of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party, eight were Zionists: Katz, Mutnik, Tuchapsky, Kremer, Petrusevich, Edelman, Vannovsky and Vigdorchik. They constituted 89% of the conference. The Zionists, as I said, also created the Socialist Revolutionary party from the remains of the Populist movement, with a Zionist called Gotz playing an important part. They created also the Constitutional Democrats’ Party, the People’s Socialist Party, and others. The principle of Zionism is to use different routes and methods to move towards a single goal. Decentralization, broadness of scope, becoming familiar with any outward appearance they care to adopt, and with any external goals which they zealously pursue, pretending to be entirely serious about what they are doing: all this constitutes the powerful and methodical approach which has for centuries enabled Zionists to subject everything to their will.

You know, back close to the beginning of 20th century, around 1905 or so, a book first was published containing the text of what became generally known as The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. The publisher was a Russian academic, Professor Sergei Nilus. Nilus himself allegedly had obtained the Protocols from a Russian official, who had obtained the text from some Russian noblewoman, who in turn had purchased the material from a Jew in Paris about 15 years earlier. The Protocols purports to be a collection of minutes or reports of meetings held by the leaders of the world Jewish community, at which they summarize the progress they had made to that time in their quest for world subversion, world ownership, and world power and outline their plans for continuing the process in the future. They talk about gaining control of the banking systems of various countries, about fomenting wars and revolutions to weaken and destroy Gentile power, about corrupting music and art and education, about subverting various Gentile institutions, about taking over the press everywhere and controlling the flow of information to the masses, about undermining the family and bringing family values into disrepute, and so on. Well, reading the Protocols makes one’s flesh crawl.

We should remember that when the Protocols began circulating in Russia in the first decade of 20th century, that country had not yet fallen victim to Bolshevism, but the Jews were already generally recognized as a dangerously subversive element in Russia, as the schemers and stringpullers behind every attempt to damage or upset the established order in Russia, and so Professor Nilus’ publication of the Protocols found a ready market among the Russian public.

The Jews have been claiming hysterically since the Protocols first appeared that the text is “a forgery.” Well, I wouldn’t call The Protocols “a forgery,” as the Jews do whenever the book is mentioned. I’m inclined to believe Professor Nilus was an astute observer of the Jews and also was a true Russian patriot. He wanted to warn the Russian people of what the Zionists (or as I call them, Jewish Supremacists) are up to, what they were planning to do to Russia, and so he imagined how the Zionist plan might look if it were all laid out in straightforward language. I believe that he wrote the text he published, but that he believed it was a reasonably accurate description of what the Jewish Zionists actually were doing.

Here in this famous painting by Russian artist Vereschagin is very symbolically depicted what Zionism had in store for Russian people.

We know that it was not the Bolsheviks who carried out the revolution of 1917. That is to say, the revolution was, in the final analysis, carried out by Zionists and for Zionists.

As Pushkin said in his “Song of Oleg”:

“From the skull of the charger a snake, with a hiss

Crept forth as the hero was speaking:

Round his legs, like a ribbon, it twined its black ring;

And the Prince shrieked aloud as he felt the keen sting.”

July 14, 2006

Today’s presentation I would like to make (time permitting) of three parts. First, I’ll tell a little bit (and just a little bit) about the history of the Protocols. Both versions: kosher and non-kosher, which means I’ll touch upon how it is presented by the Zionist Jews themselves, by those who claim that the Protocols are fake (forgery, plagiarism, and so on), and also version presented by those who do believe that they are authentic. No, I’m not going to go deep into details and I’m not going to quote from the Protocols, because, of course, we don’t have time for that, and there are some very good resources available on the Internet for those who want to learn more. I put together a list of such resources, and all Internet addresses are on that little piece of paper that I gave you. There are also some books included, and all of them are available here at our University of Oregon library. After this short excurse through the history of the Protocols, I will move onto my own and other people’s opinion regarding their importance. And, as a background there will be a slideshow. And, I hope, we will finish this session by listening to very important audio recoding of short lecture by the late Dr. William

L. Pierce, who explained everything in much more clear and powerful way then I ever could or would...

So, what is this best-selling political tract of the 20th century, the reading of which carried the death penalty in Bolshevist Russia? It was lauded by Henry Ford and Winston Churchill, and then also loudly condemned for the past 60 or so years, since it was briefly declared an anti-Semitic forgery (in a Swiss court in 1935, but later overturned by the Appeals Court in 1937)? WHY so much fuss about it? WHY do the Zionist Jews so persistently try to suppress it?

The Protocols are in fact a series of 24 mostly articulate, well-argued lectures outlining a plan for world domination, with sharp political and social analysis, lots of Machiavelli and a Marxian sophistication in its understanding of capitalism and historical processes. Briefly, it outlines a plan of world conquest by first establishing world government by consent. Therefore, understandably, as with any brilliant political analysis, it has been denounced, dismissed, misinterpreted, and even banned...

The first edition of this remarkable book was published exactly hundred years ago, in 1905, in Russia. It quickly disappeared from circulation and attracted little or no attention. One copy nevertheless reached the British Museum in 1906 and was catalogued under the number 3926 D. 17.

As the article in London Times stated on August 17, 1921:

“These documents attracted only a little attention before the Revolution of 1917. The astounding breakdown of a great state due to attack by Bolsheviks and the presence of countless Jews among them, had the result that many people were looking for – reasonable explanations of the catastrophe. The Protocols furnished this explanation, especially as the tactics of the Bolsheviks at many points, were identical with the recommendations of the Protocols.”

Therefore, later, during the whole 20^th century, the Protocols were published in many countries although powerful efforts were made to prevent their publication. In fact, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is perhaps the most tabooed book in the world... Also, next to the Bible, the Protocols are perhaps the mostly widely read book in the world!!!

The Protocols were described as a hoax. The interesting point here is that there is no evidence or proof neither that it is a hoax, nor that it is authentic. If one looks into any encyclopedia he will find the words “forgery”, “hoax” or “fraudulent” in regards to this document without the evidence for such a statement.

Now, a sensational article appeared in the London Times of May 8, 1921, from which the following quotation is taken:

“What do they mean, those Protocols? Are they genuine? Has a gang of criminals really drawn up such plans and is triumphing over their fulfillment? Are they a forgery? But how can one explain then this terrible prophetic gift that foretold all this before hand? Did we fight all these years to destroy the world power of Germany only to find ourselves now facing a much more dangerous enemy? Have we saved ourselves through enormous efforts from PAX GERMANICA only to fall a victim to PAX JUDAICA?”

The Times concludes this article with the following significant words:

“If the Protocols were written by the Learned Elders of Zion then everything that was attempted and done against the Jews, is justified, necessary and urgent”

August 4, 2006

I know that some of you say that it would be better rather to focus more on current events and I do actually agree that it is indeed very important to know what is going on today, in the Middle East or here in America, and share our feelings about it. To be well informed about AIPAC and other such things is important but myself I always emphasize that it is even more important to know and understand why things today are the way they are. All of today’s horrible events in Palestine, Iraq, Lebanon (or, for that matter, in Washington, D.C.) are just like branches and leaves of the same tree and that tree has its deep roots. Those roots are most important! If there were no roots, then there wouldn’t be any tree.

A solid understanding of history has long been the best guide to comprehending the present and anticipating the future. For example, many people ask: How did the Bolsheviks, a small movement guided by the teachings of German-Jewish social philosopher Karl Marx, succeed in taking control of Russia and imposing a cruel and despotic regime on its people? Well, very few people are aware of the extent to which Jewish Zionists were responsible for the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. That’s history.

In recent years, Jews around the world have been voicing anxious concern over the specter of anti-Semitism in the lands of the former Soviet Union. In this new and uncertain era, we are told, suppressed feelings of hatred and rage against Jews are once again being expressed in Russia. According to one public opinion survey conducted in 1991, for example, most Russians wanted all Jews to leave the country. But precisely why is anti-Jewish sentiment so widespread among the peoples of the former Soviet Union? Why do so many Russians, Ukrainians, Lithuanians and others blame the Jews for so much misfortune?

Now I will try to continue explaining to you this Taboo Subject as best as I can.

The father of communism, Karl Marx, who was a Jew himself (according to Universal Jewish Encyclopedia, Vol. VII, p. 289, “on both paternal and maternal sides Karl Marx was descended from rabbinical families”), issued his Communist Manifesto as far back as the middle of the 19th century, but it was another 50 years before mostly Jewish Communists were able to have much of an impact on the Gentile world. Whether Marx was a “religious” Jew is of no significant importance in this discussion, since Jewishness, as we know, is not defined exclusively by adherence to Judaism. The Jews themselves argue almost constantly over what makes one a Jew. Nonetheless, a great bulk of Jews today would probably identify themselves as atheists or agnostics, but also nonetheless consider themselves Jews.

But first let’s talk about the political Zionists, not Communists. Because of what’s happening right now in Lebanon, I feel as my duty to touch upon how this project of Zionists came into existence. The Zionists, just like their Communist brethren, also began propagandizing and organizing (mainly also in Russia and Poland) about the middle of the 19th century and only became really noticeable at the beginning of the 20th century, when they began having international Zionist congresses and more or less openly laying their plans to foment wars and revolutions, of which they could take advantage to promote Jewish interests.

Now, the Zionists of the late 1800s faced one major problem with their bold takeover scheme of Arab Palestine. Palestine was under the sovereignty of the Ottoman Turkish Empire and the Arabs certainly weren’t about to just give away prime real estate in Palestine to the Zionists of Europe. There were very few Jews even living in Palestine and the Jews had not controlled Palestine since the days of the Roman Empire. This destroys, by the way, the commonly believed myth that the Arabs and the Jews “have been fighting over that land for centuries.” The handful of Jews who lived in Palestine at the twilight of 20^th century got along well with their Muslim hosts and never expressed any desire whatsoever to overthrow the Ottoman rulers and set up a nation called Eretz Israel. The movement to strip Palestine away from the Ottoman Empire came strictly from Khazarian Zionists who had become very influential within several European nations and, increasingly, in America. For example, at the Zionist Congress in 1897, in Basel, Switzerland, the Zionist leader Theodor Herzl told his fellow Jews that they (the political Zionists) were having trouble persuading the Turks, who at that time controlled Palestine, to turn the country over to them, but that the Jewish leaders had plans for getting around the Turks. And I should mention that Herzl’s address to the 1897 Zionist Congress has been published in a number of places, and any diligent researcher can dig up a copy. Herzl said:

“It may be that Turkey will refuse us or will be unable to understand us. This will not discourage us. We will seek other means to accomplish our end. The Orient question is now a question of the day. Sooner or later it will bring about a conflict among the nations. . . . The great European war must come. With my watch in hand do I await this terrible moment. After the great European war is ended the peace conference will assemble. We must be ready for that time.”

Remember, Herzl was talking about the Jewry’s plans 17 years before the outbreak of the First World War. But the Jews were ready when the time came. As fate (or perhaps design) would have it, a great opportunity would soon present itself to the Zionist Mafia. There came, in 1914, “The Great War” pitting the three powers of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Turkish Empire against the three powers of England, France, and Russia. The assassination of Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne, was carried out by the assassin Gavrilo Princip, on June 28, 1914. The event, known as the assassination in Sarajevo, prompted the Austrian action against Serbia that led to World War I.

Then, in 1916, with the war more or less stalemated, the British were facing defeat and desperately needed American help. Zionists approached Britain’s political leaders and made a deal to bring the United States into the war on the side of Britain in return for a British promise to take Palestine away from Turkey and turn it over to the Jews after the war. The Zionists promised to deliver American muscle in exchange for the promise of a Zionist state in Palestine. The British government and the Zionist leaders struck a dirty deal. The Zionists were led by Chaim Weizmann, the man who later became the first President of the State of Israel. The idea was for the Zionists to use their influence to drag the mighty USA into the war on Britain’s side, so that Germany and its Ottoman allies could be crushed. In exchange for helping to bring the United States into the war, the British would reward the Zionists by giving over to them Palestine taken from the conquered Ottomans after the war was over. The British had originally wanted to give the Zionists a Jewish homeland in some African territory. But the Zionists were fixated on claiming Palestine and only Palestine as their land.

The British side of the deal was made public in the so-called Balfour Declaration. The Balfour Declaration took the form of a letter from British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour addressed to Lord Rothschild. The Balfour Declaration, in the words of British historian Prof. Harold Temperley, was a “definite contract between the British Government and Jewry.” [History of the Peace Conference in Paris, vol. 6, p. 173.] A month after the date of the Balfour Declaration in December of 1917, the British army entered Jerusalem.

And the Zionists kept their end of the bargain by working through Jews close to the President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson.

Samuel Landman, who was Secretary of the World Zionist organization from 1917-1922 wrote the following in a paper entitled “Great Britain, the Jews, and Palestine” in 1936 (published under the auspices of the Zionist Association, was intended to remind Britain of her obligations):

“. . . the only way . . . to induce the American President to come into the War was to secure the co-operation of Zionist Jews by promising them Palestine, and thus enlist and mobilize the powerful forces of Zionist Jews in America and elsewhere in favor of the Allies on a quid pro quo contract basis . . .”

The foregoing commentary by Mr. Landman implies that Zionists had the ear of President Wilson and therefore extraordinary control over U.S. foreign policy. (That was almost 100 years ago!) Since this “little detail” was left out of your high school history books, a little exploration is in order. How would Zionists have such influence? Through whom?

The American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise assists, here, by recommending Peter Grose’s excellent book Israel in the Mind of America. On page 64, the author (who is director of Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations!) states, quite plainly, that President Wilson’s top advisors at the time were Bernard Baruch, Rabbi Stephen Wise, and Justice Brandeis. He goes on to point out that, when Lord Balfour came to America to drum up support for the Balfour Declaration, instead of going to President Wilson — he headed straight for Justice Brandeis, because of the influence that Justice Brandeis wielded with the President. But what of Justice Brandeis? It would be reasonable to expect that a U.S. Supreme Court justice would be an American first and foremost — and his Jewish identity would be a far-distant secondary consideration. Yes — it would be a reasonable expectation — but also very wrong in this peculiar case. Even very small amount of research unearths immediately the fact that Justice Louis Dembitz Brandeis was a serious Zionist partisan who was actually like a leader of the world Zionist movement. His own copious writings on the topic show Zionism to be central in his life. His own words confirm this. Writing in his famous book, Zionism and Patriotism, on page 113, his loyalties are unmistakable: “Let us recognize that we Jews are a DISTINCT NATIONALITY of which EVERY JEW, whatever his country, his station, or shade of belief, is necessarily a member”. . .

Zionists powerbrokers immediately went to work to put the screws to President Wilson. During 1915 and 1916, President Wilson kept faith with the bankers who had purchased the White House for him. President Woodrow Wilson was basically the puppet of Rothschild agent Edward Mendel House. And, as I said, the Balfour Declaration took the form of a letter addressed to none other than Lord Lionel Rothschild.

Wilson had won the election to his second term in the White House in 1916 by promising America’s voters that he would keep the United States out of the European war but as soon as he took office in 1917 he began scheming to get the country into the war on the side of Britain. Overnight the Zionist influenced press transformed the German Kaiser and his people into bloodthirsty “Huns,” determined to destroy civilization. Then, the United States entered the war on Britain’s side under the ridiculous pretext of “making the world safe for democracy.” That cost a couple of million additional Gentile lives, but it got Palestine for the Jews — and it also prolonged the war enough for the Jews in Russia to topple the Tsar and get their communist revolution off the ground.

After America’s entry into World War I, President Woodrow Wilson immediately turned the government of the United States over to his Zionist backers, Paul Warburg, Bernard Baruch and Eugene Meyer. Baruch was appointed head of the War Industries Board, with life and death powers over every factory in the United States. Eugene Meyer was appointed head of the War Finance Corporation, in charge of the loan program which financed the war. Paul Warburg was in control of the nation’s banking system.

58,480 dead! 189,955 wounded! 14,290 missing! A total of 262,725 American military personnel were casualties in the Great War, now known as World War One.

But, anyways, we are supposed to talk here not about Palestine, but about Russia and not about creating of Israel, but about Bolshevik Revolution and so it would be better to stick closer to our main topic.

When I say that in Russia some Jews took the Zionist route and some the Marxist route, I don’t mean that all Jews (all 100% of them) became active participants in one or the other of those movements. Most Jews remained full-time money-grubbers and provided propaganda and financial support for their conspiratorial brethren, continuing to buy up mass media and to dispense capital to the Zionists or the communists as needed. Eventually every Russian Jew came to identify himself with either one or the other of these movements.

Very few people are aware today of the extent to which Jews were responsible for the revolution in Russia. First they organized unsuccessful revolution of 1905, and then the later and successful Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Both were heavily financed by outside Jewish banking houses, and ultimately resulted in Jews assuming control of what had become the Soviet Russia. Concurrently, Jewish Zionist machinations in the United States, Germany, Britain, and elsewhere helped set the stage for the take-over of Russia.

Long prior to the Revolution in Russia, international Jewry had conceived a hatred of Christian and Tsarist Russia, because of opposition of the Russian people and Government to Jewish Talmudism. In his introduction to the 1903 translation of the Talmud, for example, Rabbi Michael L. Rodkinson details the repeated denunciations of the Talmud over many centuries by nearly every country, the Popes, and others, and also states: “Still what has been the result? The Talmud exists today, and not one letter in it is missing. It is true, the persecutions against it are not yet at an end; accusations and calumnies by its enemies, under the new name of anti-Semites, are still directed against it, while the government of Russia legislates against and restricts the rights of the nation which adheres to the Talmud.”

And, at the turn of the twentieth century, there were already forces, led by Jacob Hirsch Schiff, a senior partner in the enormously powerful American Jewish banking house of Kuhn, Loeb, and Company, which were determined to humiliate Russia in one way or another. He was one of the prime Jewish conspirators plotting to take over Russia. The documentation of Kuhn, Loeb Company’s involvement in the establishment of Communism in Russia is much too extensive to be quoted here, but I will mention at least some facts.

Schiff waged a private war against Russia from the 1890s until 1917. His war developed over time in an all-consuming passion and took on the overtones of a personal crusade. The banker “repeatedly drew analogies between Russia and the biblical story of the Jews in Egypt; subconsciously, he doubtless saw himself as another Moses.” [Naomi W. Cohen, Jacob H. Schiff: A Study in American Jewish Leadership (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, University Press of New England, 1999), p. 124] At one point, Schiff even lobbied then President Teddy Roosevelt to conduct a Rough Rider assault, patterned after the 1898 American invasion of Cuba, against Russia. [Ron Chernow, The Warburgs: The Twentieth Century Odyssey of a Remarkable Jewish Family (New York: Random House, 1993), p. 100] Terming Schiff’s request “hysterical,” Roosevelt dismissed it out of hand. [Cohen, Jacob H. Schiff, p. 142]

Now, it’s very important to know that all the great Jewish banking monopolies have been interwoven by marriage like a rug. Note three things about the Rothschilds from the Jewish Encyclopedia of 1905: It says that of the 58 Rothschild marriages to that date, exactly half, or 29, had been to first cousins. Also this encyclopedia says that the Rothschilds “were the first to make use of journalistic methods to arouse the interest of the public in their loans. They have, however, consistently kept the secret of their own operations!” A major reason why Russia collapsed and went under the Red heel during World War I also appears in Jewish Encyclopedia of 1905, namely, “Of recent years the Rothschilds have consistently refused to have anything to do with loans to Russia owing to the anti-Jewish legislation of that empire.” (This was written in 1905.)

Abraham Kuhn and Solomon Loeb were brothers in law, German Jewish haberdashers who had made a fortune selling uniforms and blankets to the North during the American Civil War and then moved to New York starting the Kuhn & Loeb banking house in 1867. [Chernow, The Warburgs, p. 48.] Soon Kuhn & Loeb was actually run by Jacob Schiff, a Frankfurt, Germany, native who had married into the family, marrying Solomon Loeb’s daughter Theresa. Schiff’s ancestor’s had been linked to the Rothschilds, [Chernow, The Warburgs, p. 46.] and Schiff had previously worked at banking houses in Frankfurt, New York, and at the Warburg bank in Hamburg before accepting an offer from Solomon Loeb to return to the United States and become a partner at Kuhn & Loeb in New York. Schiff concentrated on what was then the most lucrative part of Wall Street: railroad financing.

Schiff’s daughter married Felix Warburg from the Hamburg, Germany, banking family where Schiff had previously worked. Paul Warburg, one of Felix’s older brothers, married Solomon Loeb’s youngest daughter from his second marriage, twenty years after Loeb’s daughter from his first marriage had married Schiff. Everything is, as I said, interwoven by marriage like a rug. Therefore Paul Warburg, in addition to being Felix Warburg’s brother, became through the two marriages his brother’s uncle. And Jacob Schiff was not only Felix Warburg’s father-in-law, he was Paul Warburg’s brother-in-law because Paul’s wife was Jacob Schiff’s half sister. [Chernow, The Warburgs, pp. 46 to 56.]

The history of the Warburg family is just as intriguing as the history of the Rothschilds. The Warburg family originally came from Italy in 1559, and this Jewish family, known in Italy as Del Branco, took the German name Warburg from the city of Warburgum, where they first settled. In 1798 the bank M.M.Warburg & Co. of Hamburg was founded. Simon Elias Warburg then went to Sweden, where he founded the first Jewish community in that country, his grandson Frederik Elias Warburg moved to England. Other Warburgs moved to Copenhagen in Denmark, and took the original name Del Branco. Paul Warburg came to the United States in 1902 and became a member of the biggest Jewish bank in the United States, Kuhn, Loeb and Co. of New York. Felix Warburg also moved to the United States and joined same bank as a partner. Max Warburg stayed in Germany. Both Paul and Felix Warburg were at various times partners in both the Kuhn & Loeb banking house in New York and in the M.M. Warburg banking house of Hamburg, Germany, that was run by their older brother Max Warburg. Paul Warburg worked actively at both banks, spending about six months each year in Hamburg and the rest of the year in New York before settling down in New York and finally becoming a U.S. citizen in 1911. At this time in history, the Warburg bank was tied in with the Rothschild bank, and the reason for Paul Warburg to move to New York, was to work for the establishment of an American Central Bank. Working at Kuhn, Loeb and Co. Paul Warburg lectured and worked on American politicians until the Federal Reserve act was passed on December 22, 1913 and, to the consternation of many, Paul Warburg, who had never voted in an American presidential election, was appointed to the Federal Reserve Board by President Woodrow Wilson in 1914.

Now, turn to the laudatory sketch of Jacob Schiff, in the Jewish Communal (Kehillah) Register of New York City, 1917-18, of which Kehillah he was an Executive Committee man. It is stated there how German-born Schiff came to America and made connections with a banking house. “The firm of Kuhn-Loeb & Co. floated the large Japanese war loans of 1904-5, thus making possible the Japanese victory over Russia . . .” Then, the last paragraph boasts “Mr. Schiff has always used his wealth and his influence in the best interests of his people. He financed the enemies of autocratic Russia. . . . and used his financial influence to keep Russia from the money market of the United States.” [This was written in 1918, after the Bolshevik revolution] It is stated that “all factions of Jewry” hailed him for this.

Yes, this amazing story begins with the war between Russia and Japan in 1904.

As it turned out, Jewish international economic power toward expressly Jewish political ends could even be asserted in Asia. With the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War, fresh currents were set in motion in the disturbed Asian waters. The Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5 gave Schiff the opportunity to flex his financial muscles in a grand manner, and as one American diplomat put it, he “went out of his way to help Japan.” [Cohen, Jacob H. Schiff, p. 135]

First of all, Jacob Schiff worked to discourage loans to Russia by the Rothschilds and other European Jewish bankers. Lord Rothschild assured Schiff in 1904 that his London bank had not handled a Russian loan since 1875 and that Russia had no chance in England with either Jewish or, for that matter, non-Jewish banks. [Cohen, Jacob H. Schiff, p. 135]

Once the Russo-Japanese War got underway, Schiff helped arrange the extremely successful Japanese financing effort. He had raised the capital for large war loans to Japan. Toward this end, Schiff helped Japan raise $180 million, nearly one-fourth of the total Japanese expenditure in its war with Russia. Some of the later loans from Schiff’s Kuhn & Loeb to Japan were in part subscribed through the Warburg’s Hamburg bank. It was due to this funding that the Japanese were able to launch a stunning attack against the Russians at Port Arthur and, the following year, to virtually decimate the Russian fleet. As the war progressed, Schiff saw Japanese gains redounding to the benefit of the Jews. “I believe the Russian Government would now go very far to gain the good will of international Jewry,” he said confidently. [Cohen, Jacob H. Schiff, p. 134]

As professor Albert Lindemann writes in his book Esau’s Tears, “Schiff, the wealthy capitalist, even funded socialist indoctrination programs for Russian prisoners of war by the Japanese, in the hope that this might aid in the Tsar’s downfall.” [p. 170] During the two years of hostilities, thousands of Russian soldiers and sailors were taken as prisoners by the Japanese. Schiff paid for the printing of one-and-a-half tons of Marxist propaganda and had it delivered to the prison camps. He also sent scores of Russian-speaking Jewish revolutionaries, trained in New York, to distribute the pamphlets among the prisoners and to indoctrinate them into rebellion against their own government. When the war was ended, 50,000 officers and enlisted men returned home to become virtual seeds of treason against Russia. They were to play a major role a few years later in creating mutiny among the military during the Communist takeover of Russia.

As historian John Lewis Gaddis said, “Schiff’s motives were quite frankly those of the Russian revolutionaries of 1905: to work for a Russian defeat at the hands of Japan, in the belief that this would hasten the revolution which, as Schiff thought, would give power to the Jews.” [John Lewis Gaddis, Russia, the Soviet Union, and the United States: An Interpretative History (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1978), pp. 43-44]

By this time American Jews had already begun to claim a leading role in international Jewish affairs. Schiff delighted in the way that he and other Jews had been able to contribute to the humbling of the great Russian Empire. He boasted that after its humiliation in the Russo-Japanese War, Russia had come to understand that “international Jewry is a power after all.” [Gary Dean Best, To Free a People: American Jewish Leaders and the Jewish Problem in Eastern Europe, 1890-1914 (Westport, CT, 1982), p. 108.] When Russia’s Prime Minister Count Witte arrived in the United States to negotiate the peace treaty with Japan, he was contacted by Simon Wolf, another American Jewish leader and long-time confidant of presidents, who told him that Russia needed two things, money and friends. He added:

The Jews of the world, as citizens of their respective countries, control much of the first ... There is no use in disguising the fact that in the United States the Jews form an important factor in the formation of public opinion and in the control of finances. ... By virtue of their mercantile and financial standing in this country they are exercising an all-potent and powerful influence. [Quoted in Albert S. Lindemann, Esau’s Tears: Modern Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 302]

This boasting by Schiff and by Wolf was transparently designed to impress the Russians, with the quite explicit goal. Observers as different as Winston Churchill and Theodore Herzl firmly believed that international Jewry even at that time exercised enormous power in international relations. British journalist Arnold White wrote that the European press and international finance were in Jewish hands, and that “the Prime Minister and the Cabinet of England alter their policy and abandon an important bill in parliament at the frown of the Rothschilds.” He concluded that Jews were making “monotonous progress toward the mastery of the world.” [Quoted Lindemann, Esau’s Tears, pp. 302-303]

Since 1890, Jewish-American financiers — led by Jacob Schiff, Isaac Seligman, and Adolph Lewisohn — had also vigorously lobbied the powerful international Jewish banking community as a collective entity to reject any Russia’s searches for loans. Ultimately defeated by Japan and suffering great indemnity demands, Russia faced a largely successful international economic lockout by Jewish money lenders. “A great nation,” reported the Jewish Chronicle with satisfaction about the teetering Russian state, “was now going from one Jewish banker to the other, vainly appealing for financial help.” [C. C. Aronsfeld, “Jewish Bankers and the Tsar,” Jewish Social Studies, April 1973. V. XXXV, no. 2, p. 103]

The following ultimatum to the huge country of Russia, and a threat to those who broke Jewish ranks to do business with it, was announced by a group of Jewish American businessmen wielding their own foreign policy, self-described as the “Hebrew alliance”:

“First, . . . no money will be loaned the Russian government by any American Jews. Second, the Rothschilds are united with the American Jewish bankers in this agreement and will use all their enormous prestige and power to assist in carrying out the threat. Third, no financial concern will be allowed to loan Russia money, under pain of the displeasure and financial punishment that such a combination of resources of the Hebrew alliance could so readily dispense.” [C. C. Aronsfeld, “Jewish Bankers and the Tsar,” Jewish Social Studies, April 1973. V. XXXV, no. 2, p. 100]

Jacob Schiff and others unashamedly used their financial influence to thwart Russia at every turn. As he boasted to Lord Rothschild in 1904, “I pride myself that all the efforts, which at various times during the past four or five years have been made by Russia to gain the favor of the American market for its loans, I have been able to bring to naught.” [Cyrus Adler, Jacob H. Schiff: His Life and Letters (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1928), vol. 2, p. 122.] This anti-Russia crusade brought Schiff to the height of his powers and to a position never before attained by an American Jewish leader. [Cohen, Jacob H. Schiff, p. 126] Interviewed in 1911, the Russian minister of finance said: “Our government will never forgive or forget what that Jew, Schiff, did to us. ... He alone made it possible for Japan to secure a loan in America. He was one of the most dangerous men we had against us abroad.” [Cohen, Jacob H. Schiff, p. 134]

Then, the American Jewish Committee was founded in 1906. Schiff told the organizing meeting that he and his friends needed a committee that would be powerful but discreet because he was fearful of substantiating the assumption prevalent in the 1890s that Jews were controlling invisible financial empires and secretly directing governments of many nations. The American Jewish Committee’s lobbying techniques included “lavish expenditures of money, public speaking campaigns, extensive distribution of propaganda, and courting politicians by playing off Republicans against Democrats.” (Sounds like today’s AIPAC) Central to the strategy of behind the scenes pressure and backstairs diplomacy that is their trademark are the political and social contacts its leaders enjoy with highlevel officials and foreign dignitaries. [Gregg Ivers, To Build a Wall: The American Jews and the Separation of Church and State (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995), p. 36.]

The history of the American Jewish Committee’s first legislative fight is important background information because it shows the awesome power of these Zionist groups even at the beginning of the twentieth century and that the methods that they are still using today to influence public opinion have been around for a long time. The book called Politics of Ethnic Pressure, written by Judith S. Goldstein (obviously Jewish) is an excellent, assiduously researched book covering this period in detail, and I rely here on her conclusions regarding Schiff’s conduct in the conflict with the U.S. Government’s handling of perceived persecutions of his fellow Jews in Russia. (By the way, Professor MacDonald also quotes her heavily.)

Their first high profile venture into the public arena was a fight for the abrogation of the Russo-American Treaty of 1832. Abrogation means to cancel, repeal or annul by authority. By the terms of a commercial treaty of 1832 reciprocal rights of sojourn and trade were granted Russian and Americans. It had permitted Russia to have some say as to those from the U.S.A. it must admit through its borders. Russia hardened its policy of refusing visas to American Jews. Russia retained some sovereignty, which Red Revolutionary Jewry from Russia, armed with American passports, could not hurdle. The Jewish mob must be free to return to Russia and put over the Jewish revolution. The reciprocal treaty of 1832 with Russia had to be broken. This campaign was enhanced when at the turn of the century increasing numbers of immigrants from Russia (most of whom were Jewish) told to Americans all kinds of fantasy tales about alleged persecution, pogroms, and injustices in Russia.

Technically, the AJC ran the campaign, widely publicizing the issue and mobilizing congressmen, opinion molders, religious leaders, and the public at large to their side. Behind the scenes, however, Schiff as always took center stage. [Cohen, Jacob H. Schiff, p. 145]

President William Howard Taft was not willing to shape America’s Russian policy around the needs of Russian Jewry and the desires of an ethnic minority at home. The background of these pre-revolutionary activities of the American Jewish Committee was covered very well in the Henry Ford’s newspaper, The Dearborn Independent (January 1921 issue), in an article entitled: “Taft Once Tried to Resist Jews and Failed.” To quote:

Mr. Taft once stood out against the Jews, was strongly denounced as unfavorable to the Jews, was soundly beaten by the Jews on a matter on which he had taken a firm stand, and has ever since shown that he has learned his lesson by accommodating the Jews in their desires . . .

For centuries Russia has had her own troubles with the Jews and, as the world knows, has at last fallen prostrate before Jewish power which for centuries, has been working to undermine her. . . . The biggest hoax in modern times was the propaganda against Russia as the persecutor of the Jews. Russia devoted to the Jews a large part of the most favored section of the land, and was always lax in those laws which prohibited Jews from settling in other parts of the country that the Jew was able to create an underground system throughout the whole of Russia which controlled the grain trade, controlled public opinion, and utterly baffled the Tsar’s government. The cry of “persecution” arose because the Jews were not permitted to exploit the peasants as much as they desired. They have, however, gained that privilege since.

Reports of U.S.A. Ministers are quoted showing that while 1500 Jews were registered in St. Petersburg with the police, 30,000 were operating there illegally. Jewish editors and writers wielded power on the leading newspapers of St. Petersburg and Moscow, and the liquor trade was entirely in Jewish hands. At every turn the United States Government discovered. . . . The Jews represented that their life in Russia was a hell . . . Presently, after years of underground work and open propaganda against Russia in the daily press, until the American conception against Russia was fixed almost beyond correction, the agitation took the form of the “Russian passport question”. . . Jews demanded nothing less than that the United States should break all treaty relations with Russia. They demanded it.

Then, in that same article, how Jacob Schiff, Louis Marshall, Adolph Krauss and Judge Henry M. Fogle (all Executive Committee members of the American Jewish Committee) walked in on President Taft at the White House, on February 15, 1911, is described. They had demanded the conference, were dined at the White House luncheon table, but President Taft insisted upon reading them his conclusions that the trade treaty of 1832 with Russia should not be broken as an exceptional favor to Jews, despite his sentiments in favor of Jewry. Jacob Schiff was enraged. “This means war!” he exclaimed. On leaving the White House, Jacob Schiff refused to even shake the President’s hand... Jacob Schiff lived to overthrow Russia.

Henry Ford wrote: “The neutrality of the United States was torn to shreds by a movement organized and financed on American soil for the overthrow of a friendly nation, and the organizers and financiers were Jews! . . . The United States was to be used as a crowbar to batter down the walls.”

When the Jewish Ambassadors left the White House, orders flew from Washington and New York to every part of the United States, and the Jewish “nagging” drive began. It had a center in every city. It focused on every Representative and Senator. It was operated on precisely the same lines as the AIPAC is proceeding today!

Jacob Schiff had said on February 15, 1911, “This means war!” So he had immediately ordered a large sum of money used for that purpose. During this period of political turmoil, the American Jewish Committee cleverly and boldly employed its network of national contacts and supported politicians such as Woodrow Wilson who were hungry for votes in the 1912 election.

Louis Marshall was the president and chief strategist of the American Jewish Committee at the time. A contemporary and ally of the Schiffs and Warburgs, he directed the American Jewish Committee in a skillful, uncompromising campaign to spread what was called the “abrogation message” to politicians at the state and national levels. The committee worked openly and unabashedly to make Congress and the public believe that the life of the Jews in Russia was a hell. Finally, in New York City in 1911, the American Jewish Committee staged an enormous rally in which featured the appearance of two presidential hopefuls, Woodrow Wilson and Champ Clark, also William Randolph Hearst, a former ambassador to Russia, and several Congressmen. On December 13th of that same year — almost ten months to a day after Jewry had declared war on President Taft’s conclusions — both houses of Congress ordered President Taft to notify Russia that the treaty with Russia would be terminated. The Jews have won.

Schiff hailed the abrogation victory in jubilant words: “For the first time, Russia, that great Colossus, has received a slap in the face from a great nation, which act . . . must be of the greatest consequence in the history of civilization.” [Cohen, Jacob H. Schiff, pp. 150-151] He bragged that the abrogation victory was “the greatest victory for the Jews since Napoleon granted them civil rights.” [Judith

S. Goldstein, The Politics of Ethnic Pressure (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1990), pp. 165-178.]

At every stage of the game of take-over Russia for Talmudism, the United States was used a base of operations for the Zionist Jews to put Russia under heel. Propaganda flooded this country that the Tsar wielded a blacksnake whip over little “angel” Jews, made to suffer just because they were “People of the Book.” Americans were taught that to the tune of millions of dollars spent by the American Jewish Committee and others. You have only to read such Jewish books as Dubnow’s History of the Jews of Russia and Poland, put out by the American Jewish Committee’s Jewish Publication Society of America for its own people to see how every law was flouted as the Talmudists rose to assassinate and crowd their way into complete mastery and butchery in Russia.

Jewish economic and political collusion against Russia, notes Edwin Black, “was widely criticized for the stubborn continuation of their boycott even as it threatened the Allies’ [World War I] war effort. But the boycott remained in effect until the monarchy was toppled in 1917.” [Edwin Black, The Transfer Agreement: The Untold Story of the Secret Agreement Between the Third Reich and Jewish Palestine (New York: MacMillan, 1984), p. 31]

Now, let’s move to Russia itself.

The Polish surname Trotsky was not the one he was born with. His true name was Leyba Davidovich Bronstein, and he was born in 1879 into a fairly wealthy family of Jewish landowners in southern Ukraine. In the fall of 1888, at the tender age of 9, Leyba Davidovich moved from the family estate to the coastal city Odessa, where he lived with his mother’s nephew, Moses Philipovich Spentzer

— a liberal Jewish publisher. After attending high school in Odessa, he went on to junior college at Nikolayev, where he fell immediately in with a group of Jewish radicals. He began to read Marx around this time and started to take part in various kinds of subversive activities. He ended up being arrested, and it was at this point in his career that he decided to adopt a pseudonym. With a stroke of irony, he took on the name of his Polish prison warden, Trotsky. During the fall of 1899 he was moved to a prison in Moscow, and was tried early in the following year. He was sentenced to four years exile in Siberia. However, before the transfer could be brought about, Trotsky decided to wed one of his fellow Jewish agitators: Alexandra Lvovna Sokolovskaya. A rabbi was brought to the prison cell to officiate. Soon after the couple’s exile to Siberia, a baby daughter was born, with another following in 1902. Despite the rigors of Siberia, Trotsky was able to contribute prolific articles to the local Irkutsk newspaper, and to receive and study Marxist books. Around this time he heard of Vladimir Ulyanov-Lenin, another Communist agitator, and the two began corresponding. Lenin wrote Trotsky that he should abandon his Siberian exile and go and live in a foreign country. Friends would help. So Trotsky found his way to Vienna, where he was aided by his fellow Jewish Communist, Victor Adler; and then on to Zurich, where another Jewish Communist, Pavel Borisovich Axelrod, was point man. Trotsky’s wife and children were left behind in Siberia (and abandoned for good) . . .

On to Paris, and then to London, where Trotsky finally met Lenin at a rooming house at 30 Holford Square, King’s Cross. Trotsky gave some Marxist lectures in London’s predominantly Jewish White Chapel district, and he took up with a Ukrainian (Gentile) woman, Natalya Ivanovna Sedova. Before long the two became lovers, and produced two children. After establishing strategy at various conferences in London, Brussels and Paris, Trotsky and Natalya (using fake passports) returned to Russia in 1905 in order to launch the revolution.

Now, let’s go into at least some details about the unsuccessful revolution of 1905. It’s very important, because years later, Lenin referred to 1905 as the “dress rehearsal for the October Revolution” of 1917. But first we also have to take at least a very brief look at history of Bolshevism itself and find out how deeply Jewish it was. Therefore, we must for the moment turn our attention to a group of revolutionary exiles who are important to this story because they and their disciples eventually became the rulers of Communist Russia. Head of this group, and the man who is generally recognized as Lenin’s teacher, was Georgy Plekhanov, a gentile. Plekhanov had fled Russia in the 1880s and settled in Switzerland. There with the aid of Vera Zasulich, Leo Deutch, and Pavel Axelrod

— all Jews — he had formed the Marxist “Group for the Emancipation of Labor,” and until 1901 was recognized as the leader of the group. Although Plekhanov was himself a gentile, those around him were, with a very few exceptions, all Jewish.

One of the exceptions was Lenin, who first became a disciple of Plekhanov, and later a competitor. Lenin (his real name Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov) was born on the banks of the River Volga in the provincial city of Simbirsk, in 1870. Lenin himself, although is usually described as a “real Russian,” in fact he was a mixture of various nationalities. It is likely that he was one-quarter Russian, one-quarter German, one-quarter Jewish and at least one-quarter Kalmuck (Mongol), which accounts for his rather Mongolic appearance.

His grandfather on his mother’s side, Israel (Alexander) Blank, was a Ukrainian Jew, though a convert to Russian Orthodox Christianity and married to a woman of German origin. This extremely important fact has been proved beyond any reasonable doubt by Dmitri Volkogonov, a former Soviet general, who had access to the KGB archives! [“Lenin’s Lineage? ‘Jewish,’ Claims Moscow News,” Forward, Feb. 28, 1992] Volkogonov published an apocryphal letter of Lenin’s sister revealing that Lenin’s great-grandparent was a Jew before he was baptized. Here is what Dmitri Volkogonov says in his book Lenin, a New Biography (New York, 1994):

“In [Lenin’s sister’s] letter to Stalin [after Lenin’s death], Anna wrote: ‘It’s probably no secret for you that the research on our grandfather shows that he came from a poor Jewish family, that he was, as his baptismal certificate says, the son of ‘Zhitomir meschanin Moishe Blank.’ She went on to suggest that ‘this fact could serve to help combat anti-semitism.’ Paradoxically for a Marxist who believed in the primacy of environmental over inherited factors, she also asserted the dubious proposition that Lenin’s Jewish origins ‘are further confirmation of the exceptional abilities of the Semitic tribe, [confirmation] always shared by Ilyich [Lenin]. . . . Ilyich always valued Jews highly.’ Anna’s claim explains, for instance, why Lenin frequently recommended giving foreigners, especially Jews, intellectually demanding tasks, and leaving the elementary work to the ‘Russian fools.’” [Volkogonov, Lenin, pp. 8-9]

Yes, a thorough-going internationalist, Lenin viewed ethnic or cultural loyalties with contempt. He had little regard for his own countrymen. “An intelligent, clever Russian,” he once remarked to writer Maxim Gorky, “is almost always a Jew or someone who has Jewish blood in his veins.” [Volkogonov, Lenin,

p. 112] Lenin also said that Jews made the best revolutionaries. Lenin was both clever and a revolutionary. He was surely referring to himself. Various authorities also allege that his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya was a 100% Jewess and that her family spoke Yiddish at home.

So, as we see, Lenin’s status as a “non-Jew” and “real Russian” is also not as clear as subsequent Soviet propaganda tried to make it. Lenin the non-Jew, in other words, was Jewish enough to have fallen under the shadow of doubt in Nazi Germany or to have been accepted in the state of Israel. [Lindemann, Esau’s Tears, p. 432]

Lenin was born to a status of comparative privilege, being the son of a government official whose title of “Actual State Counsellor” carried with it the privilege of hereditary nobility. Lenin’s father did not himself inherit the title, but acquired it as a reward of service as a school supervisor. By every rule, Vladimir Ulyanov should have become a respected member of Russian society. He was of middle class background, was university educated, and was admitted to the practice of law. That he did not do so can be ascribed in part to the fate of his older brother, Alexander, who in 1887 was executed for participating in an attempt on the life of Tsar Alexander II. This is said to have influenced Lenin to take up the career of a professional revolutionary.

In any event the year of 1895 finds young Lenin — then 25 years of age — meeting in Switzerland with the leaders of the “Group for the Emancipation of Labor.” Shortly thereafter he returned to Russia in the company of young Julius Martov (whose real name was Yuli Osipovich Tsederbaum), a Jew who had already become prominent as an agitator in the Pale of Settlement, and who was one day to become the leader of the Menshevik faction. Their purpose was to raise funds for revolutionary activity. In St. Petersburg they became involved in a series of strikes which swept the city in 1895, and in the autumn of the same year Lenin, Martov, and a number of others were convicted and sent to prison for revolutionary activity. In February of 1897 Lenin completed his prison term and began his period of exile in Siberia. He was permitted to travel to Siberia at his own expense and he took with him his wife Krupskaya and her Yiddish speaking mother.

It should be explained that, contrary to popular belief, political exiles — unless convicted of a criminal act — were not imprisoned in Siberia; rather they were paroled there. In exile the government provided a pension, sufficient usually to maintain an existence. To supplement this, the exile sometimes sought local employment (Trotsky worked as a bookkeeper) or they got funds from friends and family. Lenin received a government allowance of 7 rubles 40 kopeks monthly, “enough to pay for room, board and laundry.” [David Shub, Lenin (Mentor Books, 1950), p. 26.]

While in Siberian exile Lenin, Martov, and their Gentile accomplice Alexander Potresov, formulated the idea of an “All Russian Newspaper” which would serve to combine the thought and energies of the entire revolutionary movement. The Marxists in 1900, as at all times in the future were divided and subdivided into a great many factions. Lenin’s idea was to weld these various factions into a single organization. In February of 1900 Lenin was released from exile and applied for, and got, permission to go to Switzerland. In Geneva he joined the “Group for the Emancipation of Labor,” and in December the Group began the publication of Iskra (The Spark). The establishment of Iskra marked the beginning of Russian Marxism as an organized movement, and the beginning of Lenin’s role as a party leader.

The editorial board consisted of the “oldsters,” Plekhanov, Zasulich, Axelrod, and their disciples, Lenin, Potresov, and Martov. Lenin’s Jewish wife, Krupskaya, was the board’s secretary. Later, in 1902, young Trotsky also joined the editorial board, but without voting privileges. Four of the above — Martov, Axelrod, Zasulich, and Trotsky — were 100% Jews, Lenin — semi-Jew, while Plekhanov and Potresov were gentiles. The editorial board thus contained four Jews and, say, three gentiles. It is worth mentioning that the only other revolutionary paper in existence at this time was “Rabochee Delo” (Workers Cause), of the “Economist” faction, of whom the Jew, Fedor Ilyich Dan was the editor. Iskra was printed in Munich, Germany. For a time the editorial board met in London, but in 1903 it was moved back to Geneva. From there copies of Iskra were smuggled into Russia by ship and courier. In this way Iskra built up an underground organization of professional revolutionaries, first known as “Iskrists,” and later as Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. Thus, it can be said that Communism as an organised movement began, yes, with the publishing of Iskra in December of 1900. Three years later, in 1903, the Iskrists joined with the Polish Social Democrats, the Jewish Bund, and others, to form the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (which later changed its name to the Communist Party). And, as we see, the founders and leaders of early communism were not proletarians. Almost without exception they were highly educated Jewish intellectuals, few of whom had ever performed a useful day’s labor.

In 1903 a Unification Congress had to take place in Brussels, Belgium. Its purpose was to unite the various Marxists groups into the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party, which technically had been formed in 1898, but which had failed to bring unity. Altogether, 60 voting delegates attended, four of whom were, or had been, workers. The rest were mostly Jewish intellectuals. Here, again, Communism as we know it, was born. In early August of that year the Belgian police deported a number of delegates and the Unification Congress moved en masse to England, where it convened from August 11^th to the 23^rd. One very important outcome of the congress was the split which divided the Iskrists into two camps: The Bolsheviks (majority faction), headed by Lenin and the Mensheviks (minority faction), headed by Martov. Because Lenin had been able to martial a majority of the delegates to his support, his faction had been identified as the Bolshevik, or majority faction, and always thereafter Lenin and his followers were known as Bolsheviks.

The 1905 revolution came unexpectedly. Like the later one of 1917, it occurred in an atmosphere of war. On January 2nd, 1905, the Japanese captured Port Arthur, and thereby won (not without a help from Jacob Schiff!) the decisive victory of the Russo-Japanese war. Later in January there occurred a tragic incident which was the immediate cause of the 1905 revolution. This was the Bloody Sunday affair.

The Tsarist government, in its attempts to gain the favor of the population, and in its search for a way to combat Jewish revolutionary activity, had adopted the tactic of encouraging the formation of legal trade unions, to which subversive agitators were denied membership. These trade unions received official recognition and were protected by law.

One of the most outstanding trade union leaders — and certainly the most unusual and I would say even a bizarre figure — was Father Georgy Apollonovich Gapon, a priest in the Russian Orthodox Church. On the day Port Arthur fell a number of clashes occurred in Petersburg’s giant Putilov factory between members of Father Gapon’s labor organization and company officials. A few days later, on January 3^rd, the Putilov factory workers went on strike.

Father Gapon resolved to take the matter directly to the Tsar. On the following Sunday, January 9, 1905, thousands of people — Petersburg’s workmen and their families — turned out to participate in this appeal by the “little father.” The procession was entirely orderly and peaceful and the petitioners carried patriotic banners expressing loyalty to the crown. As they approached the Winter Palace, they were ordered to disperse. Because of the size of the crowd, most could not hear the order. The troops of the St. Petersburg garrison, which had been reinforced in anticipation of the demonstration, were ordered to open fire. Over 130 people were killed and around 300 seriously injured. This was Bloody Sunday, certainly one of the blackest days in Russia’s history. Was Tsar Nicholas II responsible for Bloody Sunday, as Marxist propagandists have claimed? He couldn’t have been because he was out of the city at the time. Father Gapon had marched on an empty palace. But the harm had been done . . .

Bloody Sunday marked the beginning of the 1905 revolution. For the first time the Jewish Marxists were joined by comparatively large numbers of the working class. Bloody Sunday delivered Russia’s population into the hands of the Jew-dominated revolutionary movement. Jewish agitators, seizing upon the discontent engendered by Russia’s defeat by the Japanese, and capitalizing on the Bloody Sunday incident fanned the flames of insurrection into being in what was to be a dress rehearsal of the 1917 revolution. Gapon escaped the country and essentially ceased to be a political actor in the unfolding drama. (He was assassinated in 1906 by Socialist Revolutionaries.)

A strike broke out in Lodz in late January, and by June 22nd this developed into an armed insurrection in which 2000 people were killed. The Tsar acted at once to recover the situation. In early February he ordered an investigation into the causes of unrest among the Petersburg workers, and later in the year (August) he announced provisions for establishing a legislature which later came to be the Duma (Parliament). Not only that but he offered amnesty to political offenders, under which, incidentally, Lenin returned to Russia. But these attempts failed.

On October 20th the Jewish Menshevik-led All-Russian Railway union went on strike. On the 21st a general strike was called in Petersburg, and on the 25^th there were general strikes in Moscow, Smolensk, Kursk, and other cities.

The revolt, coming so quickly on the heels of the Bloody Sunday incident, caught the party leadership by surprise. Lenin was in Geneva and he did not return to Petersburg until October — shortly before the Petersburg Soviet was organized. Martov the Menshevik leader, returned at the same time. Rosa Luxemburg arrived in December, by which time the insurrection had ended. Axelrod got only as far as Finland, and Plekhanov never returned at all. The 1905 revolution was principally led by second-string leaders, virtually all of whom were identified with the Mensheviks, and the majority were, yes, Jewish. Those few that were Bolsheviks

— Nikolay Bauman, Zinovy Dosser, Olga Genkina, Virgily Shantser, Yakov Sverdlov, Rozaliya Zemlyachka — all were Jewish as well.

Pinhas Moiseyevich Rutenberg played an especially active and important role in two Russian revolutions, in 1905 and later 1917. During World War I, he was among the founders of the Jewish Legion and of the American Jewish Congress. Later on, in the British Mandate of Palestine, he had obtained an exclusive concession for production and distribution of electric power and founded the Palestine Electric Company, currently the Israel Electric Corporation. Rutenberg also participated in establishing the Hagana, a nucleus of the future Israeli Army, and served as a President of the Jewish National Council. Rutenberg became Gapon’s best friend and this made him a noticeable figure in the Party of Socialist Revolutionaries. Rutenberg, in fact, like piloted the revolutionary activities of Father Gapon. Head of Petersburg section of Russian secret police Gerasimov wrote in his memoirs that Gapon opened a plan to kill the Tsar during talk with him and Pyotr Rachkovsky. “Suddenly I asked Gapon, if there was a plan to kill the Tsar when he comes out. Gapon replied: ‘Yes, It’s true. It was Rutenberg’s plan, not mine. I was informed about it much later.’” There is still confusion about whether this is true or not. But it’s commonly known that Rutenberg was the one who killed Father Gapon. He was hanged by Pinhas Rutenberg in accordance with a “sentence” passed on him by the Socialist-Revolutionary Party . . .

Russia’s minister of foreign affairs, Count Vladimir Nikolaevich Lamsdorf, informed the Tsar that the Revolution of 1905 had been “actively supported and partly directed by the forces of universal Jewry,” led by the Alliance Israelite Universelle, which had “gigantic pecuniary means” and an “enormous membership.” [Lindemann, Esau’s Tears, p. 303]

On October 26th the revolutionary Petersburg Soviet was founded. This Petersburg Soviet assumed the functions of a national government. It issued decrees and otherwise exercised the prerogatives of a government. From the very beginning the Soviet was dominated by the Mensheviks, although the Social Revolutionary Party (Essers) was also represented. Its first president was Jewish Menshevik, Zborovski, who was succeeded by Georgii Nosar, also Jewish. He in turn was succeeded by Trotsky, who, it must be emphasized, chiefly as a result of the prestige gained in 1905, became one of the guiding spirits of the October revolution in 1917.

Trotsky alone of the top leadership had sensed the significance of Bloody Sunday, and at the first word of revolution he and a Jewish compatriot, Parvus, had struck out for Petersburg. Using the pseudonym Yanovsky, he very quickly became a leading member of the Soviet, and by the end of October was generally recognized as the most influential member of the Executive Committee. In addition, he edited (with Parvus) the Menshevik organ, “Nachalo.” Later, under the pseudonym, “Pyotr Petrovich” he edited the “Russkaya Gazeta.” Trotsky became president of the Petersburg Soviet on December 9th, 1905, and a week later some 300 members of the Soviet, including Trotsky himself, were arrested. The revolution was almost, but not quite over.

Although Lenin had been in St. Petersburg throughout the life of the Petersburg Soviet, neither he nor any member of his faction played a prominent part in its activities. When the 300 members of the Soviet were finally arrested, not a single prominent Bolshevik was among them. As I said, the revolution of 1905 was rather strictly a Jewish Menshevik affair.

On December 20^th, following Trotsky’s arrest, Israel Lazarevich Helphand (better known by his pseudonym Alexander Parvus), assumed leadership of the revolt and control of a new executive committee of the Soviet and organized a general strike in Petersburg which involved 90,000 workers. The next day 150,000 workers went on strike in Moscow, and there were insurrections in Chita, Kansk, and Rostov. But within a week the government had gained the upper hand and by the 30th of December the revolution was over.

Parvus was also arrested and thrown into the Peter-Paul Fortress Prison in St. Petersburg, along with two other fellow Jewish revolutionaries: Leon Trotsky and Leon Deutsch. After VIP treatment in jail, and a democratic trial, they were exiled to Siberia once more. However, after arrival in Siberia, Trotsky hardly even stooped to unpack but merely got on a train going in the opposite direction and ended up once more with his common-law wife Natalya in Finland.

When the entire leadership of the Petersburg Soviet was rounded up and jailed in December 1905, Parvus escaped the police clutches. When he was later captured, he escaped police custody, courtesy of the Okhrana agent Leon Deutsch. Parvus next turned up, via Germany, in Constantinople, as a “journalist” covering the Young Turk rebellion against the Ottomans, a crucial prelude to the British-manipulated second Balkan War.

While Parvus protégé Leon Trotsky is widely credited with the authorship of the concept of “permanent revolution,” Trotsky himself attributed the idea to Parvus, his closest ally during the period of the 1905 St. Petersburg Soviet revolt. Trotsky codified the Parvus outlook, in his two famous works, Permanent Revolution and Results and Prospects. In the first of those works, Trotsky wrote, “The permanent revolution, in the sense which Marx attached to this concept, means a revolution which makes no compromise with any single form of class rule, which does not stop at the democratic stage, which goes over to socialist measures and to war against reaction from without; that is, a revolution whose every successive stage is rooted in the preceding one and which can end only in complete liquidation.” But Parvus himself said it best. In an article in his magazine Iskra, on the eve of World War I and the Revolution, he boasted, “The Russo-Japanese War is the blood-red dawn of coming great events.” And in The Class Warfare of the Proletariat (Berlin, 1911), Parvus wrote in praise of war: “The war sharpens all capitalist contradictions. A world war may therefore be concluded only by a world revolution.”

As an outcome of the 1905 revolution, Tsar Nicholas II set about remedying the shortcomings of his regime in a most commendable manner. At his decree, Russia was given representative government and a constitution. An elective legislative — the Duma — was established, and free elections were held. By these measures and others which followed, Russia seemed well on the way to becoming a constitutional monarchy patterned after the western European model, and as a point of fact it was only the outbreak of World War I which prevented this from becoming a reality.

As would be expected, the Jewish revolutionary parties bitterly opposed these reforms, looking on them as merely a device by which the forces of revolution would be dissipated. Actually these measures did succeed in pacifying the Russian masses, and the years between 1905 and 1914 were ones of comparative quiet and progress. No man deserves more credit for this state of affairs than Russia’s Prime Minister Pyotr Arkadyevich Stolypin, who in the year following the 1905 revolt emerged as the most impressive figure in Imperial Russia.

From 1906 to 1911 it is no exaggeration to say that he dominated Russian politics. It was he who gave Russia the famed “Stolypin Constitution,” which among other things undertook to guarantee the civil rights of the peasantry, which constituted 85% of Russia’s population. His land reforms, for which he is most famous, not only gave the peasant the right to own land, but actually financed the purchase with government loans. Stolypin was determined to give the peasant a stake in capitalism, believing that “the natural counterweight of the communal principal is individual ownership.”

Were the Stolypin land reforms effective? American writer Bertram Wolfe, who is on all points anti-Tsarist and pro-revolutionary, has this to say:

Between 1907 and 1914, under the Stolypin land reform laws, 2,000,000 peasant families seceded from the village mir and became individual proprietors. All through the war the movement continued, so that by January 1, 1916, 6,200,000 peasant families, out of approximately 16,000,000 eligible, had made application for separation. Lenin saw the matter as a race with time between Stolypin’s reforms and the next upheaval. Should an upheaval be postponed for a couple of decades, the new land measures would so transform the countryside that it would no longer be a revolutionary force. How near Lenin came to losing the race is proved by the fact that in 1917, when he called on the peasants to “take the land,” they already owned more than three-fourths of it. [Bertram Wolfe, Three Who Made a Revolution (New York: Dial Press, 1948), p. 360]

Russian Jewry wanted revolution, not reform. As early as 1906 an attempt had been made to assassinate Premier Stolypin when his country house was destroyed by a bomb. Finally in September of 1911 the best Prime Minister Russia ever had was shot down in cold blood while attending a gala affair at the Kiev theatre. The assassin was a Jewish fellow named Mordekhai Gershkovich Bogrov. Thus it was that Russia had since 1902 lost two premiers to Jewish assassins. According to information that I found recently on Wikipedia, from 1901 to 1911 revolutionaries killed 17 thousand people (9 thousand in 1905-1907). [“An Epidemic of Terrorism,” Nezavisimaya Gazeta, April 29, 2001 (in Russian)]

Many of Stolypin’s reforms were carried out after his death. In 1912 an industrial insurance law was inaugurated which gave all industrial workmen sickness and accident compensation to the extent of two-thirds and three-fourths of their regular pay. For the first time the newspapers of the revolutionary parties were given legal status. Public schools were expanded and the election laws were revised. In 1913 a general amnesty for all political prisoners was given. Not even the severest critic of Tsarism can deny that these measures represented a sincere attempt on the part of the Imperial government to bring about reform. Why then, in spite of all this, was the Tsar overthrown? We are going to talk about this when we continue next time.

September 8, 2006

In the night of July 16-17, 1918, a squad of Bolshevik secret police (ChK) murdered Russia’s last emperor, Tsar Nicholas II, along with his wife, Tsaritsa Alexandra, their 14-year-old son, Tsarevich Alexis, and their four daughters. They were cut down in a hail of gunfire in a half-cellar room of the house in Yekaterinburg, a city in the Ural mountain region, where they were being held prisoner. The daughters were finished off with bayonets. To prevent a cult for the dead Tsar, the bodies were carted away to the countryside and hastily buried in a secret grave.

Bolshevik authorities at first reported that the Romanov emperor had been shot after the discovery of a plot to liberate him. For some time the deaths of the Empress and the children were kept secret. Soviet historians claimed for many years that local Bolsheviks had acted on their own in carrying out the killings, and that leaders of the new Soviet state, had nothing to do with the crime.

In 1990, Russian playwright and historian Edvard Radzinsky announced the result of his detailed investigation into the murders. He unearthed the reminiscences of Lenin’s bodyguard Akimov, who recounted how he personally delivered execution order to the telegraph office. The telegram was signed by Soviet government chief Yankel Movshevich Sverdlov. Akimov had saved the original telegraph tape as a record of the secret order. Radzinsky’s research confirmed what earlier evidence had already indicated. Leon Trotsky had revealed years earlier that Sverdlov and other Jews in Bolshevik government made the decision to put the Russian Tsar and his family to death. Writing from exile in 1935, Trotsky dismissed with contempt the official Soviet claim that the Ural Soviet’s Executive Committee acted independently of Moscow. He recalled a casual conversation that he had had with Sverdlov:

My next visit to Moscow took place after the [temporary] fall of

Yekaterinburg [to anti-Communist forces]. Speaking with Sverdlov, I asked

in passing: “Oh yes, and where is the Tsar?”

“Finished,” he replied. “He has been shot.”

“And where is the family?”

“The family along with him.”

“All of them?” I asked, apparently with a trace of surprise.

“All of them,” replied Sverdlov. “What about it?” He was waiting to see my

reaction. I made no reply.

“And who made the decision?” I asked.

“We decided it here.”

I asked no further questions and considered the matter closed. [Leon Trotsky, diary entry of 9 April 1935, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Trotsky Archive, bMS Russ 13, T-3731, p. 111]

The neo-con historian Richard Pipes (daddy of notorious Daniel Pipes), like many other writers, has judged Trotsky’s statement to be “incontrovertible positive evidence” that the order came directly from Moscow. [Pipes, Russian Revolution,

p. 770.]

Yakov Sverdlov, who supervised the expulsion of the Tsar’s family to Yekaterinburg in the Ural Mountains and their slaying there, Alexander Beloborodov (Vaisbart), who was the president of the local Soviet and who made first announcement about execution of Tsar, Shaya “Filipp” Goloshchekin, who was Military commissar of the Ural Regional Soviet, Petr Voikov (Pinkus Vainer), as well as Yankel Chaimovich Yurovsky who was the commander of the unit that carried out the slaughter and who personally shot the Tsar in the forehead from a range of zero, all were Jews. Yurovsky was the son of a glassmaker and suspected thief. His grandfather was a Rabbi in Poland. Yurovsky studied at a Jewish school in Tomsk, but did not finish. While living in Berlin during the time of the 1905 revolution in Russia he converted to Lutheranism and changed his name from Yankel Chaimovich to the christianized Yakov Mikhailovich. According to his sister-in-law, he was an arrogant, greedy, and cruel despot who liked to say, “Those who are not with us are against us.” [Quoted in Mark D. Steinberg and Vladimir M. Krustalev, The Fall of the Romanovs: Political Dreams and Personal Struggles in a Time of Revolution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), p.285]

Even such leading Zionist intellectual as Jacob Leib Talmon, who was Professor of Modern History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, makes the following statement in his book Israel Among the Nations: “As if to heighten the symbolism of that dreadful end of one of the most powerful Royal dynasties in history at the hands of an obscure Jew, soldiers of the counter-revolutionary army seized Yekaterinburg a short time after, and found in the murdered Tsarina’s room a copy of the Protocols of Zion...” [J. L. Talmon, Israel Among the Nations (New York: Macmillan, 1970), pp. 69-70]

Talmon seems to be following another Zionist writer’s, Norman Cohn’s, book Warrant for Genocide. Cohn wrote, “Some months before her murder at Yekaterinburg the deposed Empress had received from a friend, Zinaida Sergeyevna Tolstaya, a copy of Nilus’ book containing the Protocols. . . . the Empress took Nilus’s book with her to her last home. . . . A week after the murder of the imperial family ... the remains of the Tsar, the Tsarina, and their children, dismembered and incinerated, were discovered at the bottom of a disused mine-shaft ... ... the examining magistrate found three books belonging to the Empress: the first volume of War and Peace, the Bible in Russian, and The Great in the Small by Nilus.” [Norman Cohn, Warrant For Genocide (New York, 1970), p. 126-7.]

Recent research and investigation by Edvard Radzinsky and other historians corroborates the account provided years earlier by Robert Wilton, correspondent of the London Times in Russia for 17 years. His account, The Last Days of the Romanovs, originally published in 1920 is based in large part on the findings of a detailed investigation carried out in 1919 under the authority of “White” (anti-Communist) leader Alexander Kolchak. Wilton’s book remains one of the most accurate and complete accounts of the murder of Russia’s imperial family. In The Last Days of the Romanovs, Robert Wilton, summed up the so-called “Russian” Revolution in these words: “The whole record of the Bolshevism in Russia is indelibly impressed with the stamp of alien invasion. The murder of the Tsar, deliberately planned by the Jew Sverdlov and carried out by the Jews Goloshekin, Syromolotov, Safarov, Voikov, and Yurovsky, is the act, not of the Russian people, but of this hostile invader.” [Robert Wilton, The Last Days of the Romanovs (Newport Beach, CA: Noontide Press, 1993)]

In 1907 (May 13 – June 1) a fifth Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party was held, this time in London. This was by all accounts the most impressive one of all, and it was the last one held before the 1917 revolution. Represented at the Congress were:

The Bolsheviks, led by Lenin — 91 delegates.

The Mensheviks, led by Martov and Dan — 89 delegates.

The Polish Social Democrats, led by very Jewish Rosa Luxemburg — 44 delegates.

The Jewish Bund, led by Rafael Abramovitch and Mikhail Lieber — 55 delegates.

The Lettish Social Democrats, led by “Comrade Herman” (Danishevsky).

Dominating the Congress were the same great names of the party: there were the founders of the movement, Plekhanov, Axelrod, Deutch, and Zasulich — who after 1907 played roles of diminishing importance in party affairs — and their disciples, Lenin, Martov, Dan, and Trotsky. There were Abramovich and Lieber (Goldman) of the Jewish Bund, and Rosa Luxemburg who latter one day being destined to lead a revolution of her own in Germany. Present also were Stalin, Zinoviev, Kamenev none of whom were important in 1907, but who are historically important enough to mention now here because one day they would be the three most powerful men in Russia. Significantly all of those named were Jewish, excepting Plekhanov, and Stalin.

In the autumn of 1908 the Bolsheviks began publishing the Proletarij (The Proletarian), with Lenin, Dubrovinsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev as editors. In the same year the Menshevik paper, Golos Sotsial-Demokrata (Voice of Social Democrat) began publication, edited by Plekhanov, Axelrod, Martov, Dan, and Martynov (Pikel), all of whom were Jewish with the exception of Plekhanov. In October of 1908 the Vienna Pravda was launched, with Trotsky as editor. So much for who controlled the media...

The Troika: In 1909 the Lenin-Zinoviev-Kamenev “troika” was formed. It was to endure until Lenin’s death in 1924. Zinoviev and Kamenev were Lenin’s inseparable companions. Later, when the Bolsheviks were in power, Trotsky would become co-equal with Lenin, and even something of a competitor, but Kamenev and Zinoviev were never Lenin’s equals nor his competitors — they were his right and left hand. They would argue with him, and fight with him, and oppose him in party councils, but the “troika” was broken only when Lenin died.

Perhaps one of the most important matters taken up by the London Congress was the controversial question of “expropriations.” It should be explained that revolutionaries to an increasing degree resorted to outlawry to replenish Party’s finances. Robbery, kidnapping, and theft became regular party activities. These activities were referred to in party circles as “expropriations.” The most famous expropriation was the Tiflis bank robbery, engineered by young Josef Stalin shortly after the London Congress. The Tiflis bank robbery has now become a part of the legend which surrounds Stalin, and it is perhaps worth while to give it some attention. Although the robbery was engineered by Stalin, then a minor party worker, the actual hold-up was carried out by an Armenian by the name of Ter-Petrosyan, who is known in Russian history as “Kamo.” Kamo’s method was crude but effective: he tossed a dynamite bomb at a bank stage which was transporting 250,000 rubles in currency. In the resulting explosion some 30 people were killed and Kamo escaped with the loot, which consisted mainly of 500 ruble notes. The Bolsheviks encountered considerable difficulty in converting these 500 ruble notes into usable form. It was decided that agents in various countries would simultaneously cash as many as possible in a single day. The operation was not a complete success. The Jewess, Olga Ravich, who was one day to marry Zinoviev was apprehended by police authorities, as was one Meyer Wallach Finklestein, who is better known as Maxim Litvinov. Litvinov later became Bolshevik Russia’s Commissar of Foreign Affairs.

In January of 1910 the 19 top leaders of the Party met again in what historians refer to as the January Plenum of the Central Committee. Its purpose was, as always, to promote party unity. One outcome of the January Plenum was the recognition of the newspaper, Golos Sotsial-Demokrata, as the general party newspaper. Its editors were the Bolsheviks, Lenin and Zinoviev, and the Mensheviks, Martov and Dan. Lenin was the only gentile (or rather semi-gentile). Trotsky’s semi-independent Vienna Pravda was declared to be an official party organ, and Kamenev was appointed to help edit it. Who could have foretold in the year 1910 that within seven short years this Yiddish crew would be the lords and masters of all Russia?

Now, one of the chief factors contributing to the destruction of the Russian government was the onset of World War I.

Before the war the Imperial military establishment had contained perhaps 1,500,000 professional troops, well trained and loyal to the crown, “but by 1917 the regular army was gone. Its losses for the first ten months of the war were reckoned as 3,800,000, or, to take the reckoning of the Quartermaster-General, Danilov, 300,000 a month and the officers, who went into action standing, while commanding their men to crawl, were falling at twice the rate of the men.” [Bernard Pares, Russia (New York: New American Library, 1949), p. 41] Altogether 18 million men were called to the war, most of whom were conscripted from the peasantry. Although courageous in battle they proved politically unreliable and were easily incited by agitators.

Large numbers of the industrial population were also drafted into the armies, and their places were taken by peasants, fresh out of the country. As a result, Russia’s principal cities came to be populated by a working class which was peasant in origin and habit of thinking, but which lacked the conservatism and stability which seems to go with tenure of the land. This new proletariat was in reality an uprooted and landless peasantry, poorly adjusted to city life, and easily stirred up by Jewish propagandists.

It should be remembered that the Russian revolution was carried out by a handful of revolutionaries operating mainly in the larger cities. While something like 85% of Russia’s gentile population was rural, these country people took virtually no part in the revolt. Conversely only 2.4% of the Jewish population was actually situated on the farms; the great majority of the Jews were congregated in the cities. Says the Universal Jewish Encyclopedia: “it must be noted that the Jews lived almost exclusively in the cities and towns; in Russia’s urban population the Jews constituted 11%.” [Universal Jewish Encyclopedia (New York, 1939), vol. 9,

p. 285]

Also significant was the fact that the theater of World War One was situated in those areas most heavily populated by Jews. By 1914, it should be remembered, Russia’s Jewish population was nearing the seven million mark. (The exact figure given in the Universal Jewish Encyclopedia is 6,946,000). A substantial number of these resided in Russian-Poland, which was a war zone. The majority of these Jews, out of hatred for Russia, were inclined to favor a German victory. As a result, the Imperial high command was compelled to remove all Jews from the war area in the early part of 1915. In May of 1915, for example, the supreme command expelled all Jewish residents from the provinces of Courland and Grodno. Altogether, nearly a half million Jews were forced to leave their homes in the military zone. These expellees were at first required to remain within the Pale of Settlement, but in August of 1915 they were permitted to settle in all cities in the empire. Thus it was that as the war progressed a flood of Russia-hating Jews began infiltrating the cities beyond the Pale.

Many people today still actually believe the Communists were successful in Russia because they were able to rally behind them the sympathy and frustration of the Russian people who were supposedly “sick of the rule of the Tsars.” This is to ignore the history of what actually happened. While almost everybody is reminded that the Bolshevik Revolution took place in November of 1917, few know that the Tsar had abdicated seven months earlier.

The first revolution of 1917 occurred in March, in St. Petersburg, capital city of the Russian Empire. From beginning to end the revolt involved an amazingly small number of people when we consider that the fate of 150 million Russians was at stake. The revolt came, as I have tried to explain it to you in previous few segments of this lecture, because of Jewish unrest, because of Jewry’s dissatisfaction, and above all, because of Jewry’s determination to destroy Tsarism. By the spring of 1917 Russia’s unstable urban population had been thoroughly poisoned by the subversive propaganda. A food shortage in Petersburg and other cities caused by war fanned people’s dissatisfaction into the flame of revolution.

St. Petersburg (Petrograd) in the third year of World War I was Russia’s chief armaments production center, and by reason of this possessed the largest industrial population of any city in Russia. It also had the largest Jewish population of any city outside the Pale of Settlement. By March, 1917, a breakdown in the Russian transportation system resulted in a severe food shortage in the city. At the same time, many of the city’s factories began shutting down due to material shortages. Both of these factors were extremely important in the days immediately ahead. The desperate food shortage affected virtually every family in the city. Furthermore, the enforced idleness of the working population — due to factory shutdowns — threw vast numbers of workmen onto the streets.

Second-string Jewish revolutionaries, their leaders being out of the country, fanned the flames of dissent.

On March 10, 1917, an American photographer, Donald Thompson, has described how someone who tried to pass through the growing mob “was dragged out of his sleigh and beaten. He took refuge in a stalled streetcar where he was followed by the workingmen. One of them took a small iron bar and beat his head to a pulp. This seemed to give the mob a taste for blood. . . . Many of the men carried red flags on sticks . . .” [Donald C. Thompson, Donald Thompson in Russia (New York: Century Co., 1918), p. 54]

The disorder became general. The mobs turned their fury on the police, who barricaded themselves for a desperate last stand in the police stations. There they were slaughtered almost to the last man, and the prisons were emptied of their entire populations, including desperate criminals of every category.

Tsar Nicholas II was not in St. Petersburg at the time, but after hearing the details and misunderstanding the situation, he sent a message requesting that the Duma (legislature) be dissolved. Four days later, on the 16th, the Tsar, whose train never reached Petersburg, abdicated. The closing words of his written abdication announcement were: “May God have mercy on Russia.” And before a year had passed, these words had been echoed many, many times...

The March of 1917 marked the formation of two governing bodies which were to jointly rule Russia for the next eight months. The first of these was the Provisional Committee of the Duma, consisting of twelve members headed by Georgy Lvov. This group served as the Provisional Government until overthrown in October by the Bolsheviks. At all times, however, it governed by the sufferance of the Petersburg Soviet, which was the second body organized on the 12^th of March. This Petersburg Soviet was in reality dominated by the Menshevik and Bolshevik factions of the so-called Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, of whom the Mensheviks were by far the most powerful. A second party, the Social Revolutionary Party, was a minority party.

The Provisional Government made one fatal “mistake” which were to profoundly affect the revolution. It permitted all exiled political prisoners to return to Russia. By doing so it sealed the fate of Russia. Thousands of them streamed into Russia in late April, May, June, and July of 1917.

At that time Lenin and his Jewish wife Nadezhda Krupskaya were living in Switzerland. They were supported by Max Warburg, a Jewish banker from the German city Hamburg.

With Max Warburg running the show in Europe, his brother Paul Warburg ran the show in the United States. It was Paul Warburg who gave political protection to Trotsky, who arrived in New York on January 13, 1917.

When after years of agitating around Western Europe, Trotsky was expelled from France, in January of 1917, he came to the United States at the invitation of Warburg and Schiff. His travel expenses aboard the ship Monserrat were paid by his hosts. A luxury apartment was rented for him, with the rent paid three months in advance. He remained in America for several months while writing for a Russian socialist paper, the Novy Mir (New World), out of their offices at 177 St. Mark’s Place on the Lower East Side — right in the heart of the Jewish section of Manhattan. Novy Mir was owned by two Communist Jews named Weinstein and Brailovsky. According to the New York police, who monitored Trotsky’s activities, his main associates during this period were well known Jewish anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman. He was also giving revolutionary speeches at mass meetings in New York City. According to Trotsky himself, on many occasions a chauffeured limousine was placed at the service of his family by wealthy Jewish friends. It must have been a curious sight to see the family of the great socialist radical, defender of the working class, enemy of capitalism, enjoying the pleasures of tea rooms and chauffeurs, the very symbols of capitalist luxury. In any event, it is now known that almost all of his expenses in New York, including the mass rallies, were paid for by Jacob Schiff. Things were starting to heat up in Mother Russia in 1917, and Trotsky sensed that the time was ripe for another takeover bid. But finance for the revolution was essential. Oddly, these so-called enemies of capitalism had no difficulty whatsoever in raising vast amounts of capital from Jewish financiers around the world.

Not only were Jews represented in amazing numbers among the Marxist revolutionaries, but the wealthiest Jewish bankers gave financing to them. It is a well-known fact that the Bolsheviks were financed by Jewish Zionist interests in the West. One of the prime Zionist conspirators plotting to take over Russia was (again!) Jacob Schiff, who as head of the enormously powerful New York Jewish banking house of Kuhn, Loeb & Co. was probably the wealthiest Jewish banker in the world.

Turn to the laudatory sketch of Jacob Schiff, in the Jewish Communal (Kehillah) Register of New York City, 1917-18, of which Kehillah he was an Executive Committeeman. It is stated there how German-born Schiff came to America and made connections with a banking house. The last paragraph boasts “Mr. Schiff has always used his wealth and his influence in the best interests of his people. He financed the enemies of autocratic Russia. [This was written in 1918, after the Bolshevik revolution had been made secure]...” It is stated that “all factions of Jewry” hailed him for this.

At a Bolshevik celebration rally in New York’s Carnegie Hall on the night of 23 March 1917, a telegram of support from Jacob Schiff was read out. The telegram was reprinted in the next morning’s New York Times. Schiff later tried to deny his involvement, but thirty years later his grandson John admitted that the old man had given as much as twenty million dollars for the Bolshevik cause. In the New York Journal-American of Feburary 3, 1949, society columnist Cholly Knickerbocker wrote that Jacob Schiff’s grandson, a prominent member of New York society at that time, revealed that his grandfather’s firm Kuhn & Loeb “sank” $20 million dollars into the “final triumph of Bolshevism in Russia.”

Trotsky was given $20 million in Jacob Schiff gold to help finance the revolution, which was deposited in a Warburg bank, then transferred to the Nya Banken in Stockholm, Sweden. On 26 March 1917 Trotsky boarded the Norwegian steamer “Kristianiafjord” for a journey to Sweden, and then via railroad through Sweden and Finland to St. Petersburg in Russia. He was accompanied by 275 welltrained Jewish communist soldiers-of-fortune from the New York’s Lower East Side, plus a large amount of gold, courtesy of Jacob Schiff.

The British Government did not know what its own intelligence service was doing, and when the British War Department found out that Trotsky and his group had left New York, a telegram was sent on March 29, 1917, to the Canadian authorities, to arrest Trotsky and his family and his comrades when the ship stopped to refuel in the Canadian port of Halifax. On April 3rd, the Canadians, under orders from the British Admiralty, arrested Trotsky, and his men, taking them to the prison at Amherst; and impounded his gold. When Trotsky was searched the Canadian police found $10,000 in cash on him. The amount is known with certainty and the money in his possession is now a matter of official record.

Trotsky was arrested by the Canadian authorities on the sound rationale that he was heading for Russia to take Russia out of the Great War and thereby increase the Germans’ capabilities on the Western front. Official records, later declassified by the Canadian government, indicate that they knew Trotsky and his small army were “socialists leaving for the purposes of starting revolution against present Russian government...” The Canadians wanted to keep Trotsky and his comrades in prison, to hinder them from going to Russia. But in a day or so, a new telegram arrived from London which said, “Put Trotsky back on the ship and let them go. Give them back their money and weapons”. The British government (through intelligence officer Sir William Wiseman, who later became a partner with Kuhn, Loeb and Co.) and American government (through Colonel House) urged them to let Trotsky go.

In a stunning reversal of “how things are supposed to be,” the American President Woodrow Wilson intervened with the British and Trotsky was allowed to continue on his way, since he had the advantage of an American passport. Years later when the secrecy regarding this period had been lifted, it was confirmed that it was indeed the American Government which demanded that Trotsky be set free and sent on his way to Russia. President Wilson said that if they didn’t comply, the

U.S. wouldn’t enter the War. Trotsky was released, given an American passport, a British transport visa, and a Russian entry permit. It is obvious that President Wilson knew what was going on, because accompanying Trotsky, was Charles Crane of the Westinghouse Company, who was the Chairman of the Democratic Finance Committee. A man with an unsavory background, frequent arrests, jailings and exile for revolutionary activities against a government allied with the U.S. in a world war, Trotsky was freed by Presidential intervention — against the express wishes and sound reasonings of America’s most important ally in this same European war! What forces came into play in Washington? Who ran the show there even in the early part of the last century? Would anybody care to guess?

By the way, in its defense, the American Government stated that Aleksandr Kerensky, a member of Russia’s Provisional Government, had requested the freedom of Trotsky. This is very odd, since Trotsky later put Kerensky out of office during the October revolution of 1917. Is it not strange that then Kerensky was able to leave Russia and move to New York, where he joined Trotsky’s wealthy Jewish bankers and industrialists and lived a long life and died as a multimillionaire, in 1970, at the age of 89?

The United States of America entered the war on April 6th. Trotsky arrived in Petrograd on May 17, 1917. By the time Trotsky reached Russia, the revolution had already taken place. The Tsar had been deposed and a new government installed. But being a communist, Trotsky wanted to have things his own way.

Lenin at that time, as I just said a couple of moments ago, was in Switzerland and had been in Western Europe since 1905 when he was exiled for trying to topple the Tsar in the abortive Communist revolution of that year.

In spring of 1917, Lenin went back to Russia, across Europe-at-war, on the famous “sealed train.” With him Lenin took some $5 to $6 million in gold. The whole thing was arranged by Max Warburg, through another very wealthy fellow Jew Israel Helphand alias “Parvus.”

In addition to the groups that arrived with Lenin and Trotsky from Switzerland and New York, some 8,000 Jewish revolutionaries from different countries arrived in St. Petersburg and formed the core of the emerging Communist party. It was these men that would take up leadership in the Red Army and in the terrible Cheka…

These returning exiles were the heart of the coming “Russian” Revolution. They were almost to the last man professional revolutionaries, and with few exceptions they were Jewish. Stalin, Sverdlov, and Zinoviev were among the exiles who returned from Siberia. Lenin, Martov, Radek, and Kamenev returned from Switzerland. Trotsky returned, with hundreds of his Yiddish brethren, from New York’s East Side. These were the inheritors of the revolution. Until their return the revolution had been without leadership — largely it had been conducted by second string leaders who happened to be on the spot. Now the elite were returning. Soon these returning Jews would exercise the power of life and death over 150 million Russians. Soon every factory, every government bureau every school district, and every army unit would function under the gimlet eye of a Jewish Commissar. Soon the blood of human beings would be oozing from under the doors of communist execution chambers as tens of thousands of Russian men and women were butchered like cattle in a slaughterhouse. Soon millions of Russian and Ukrainian peasants would be deliberately starved to death as part of a premeditated plan. Such was the “romance” of the Bolshevik revolution.

When Lenin arrived in St. Petersburg in April 1917, he found the Petersburg Soviet dominated by the Mensheviks, with the Essers (Social Revolutionaries) second in membership, and the Bolsheviks still in the minority. Although the Mensheviks controlled the Petersburg Soviet, they were badly divided among themselves. The main body of the Menshevik faction — the defensists — was headed by Fyodor Dan (Gurvich) and Mikhail Lieber (formerly of the Jewish Bund). The other group of Mensheviks, — the internationalists — was headed by Martov. Recall that the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks were majority and minority factions of the same party. Both factions were completely Jewish-controlled.

The Petersburg Soviet, although it controlled the mob, was reluctant to assume the responsibility of governing — at least in the beginning. The Soviet, as I said, was originally organized by second-string leaders who were quite capable of stirring up trouble, but who had little capacity for leading a revolutionary government. Furthermore, it was not clear in the early days of the revolution as to what the final outcome would be. Petersburg was, after all, only one city in the empire, and the attitude of the country as a whole, and of the soldiers at the front, was unknown. For this reason the Soviet preferred that the Provisional Government — which had some semblance of legitimacy — should temporarily rule.

Lenin bitterly criticized this state of affairs. He regarded the Provisional Government as an instrument of the “bourgeois” and he immediately and violently advocated its overthrow. Throughout April, May, and June the Bolsheviks preached the destruction of the Provisional Government, and among the factory workers and the military garrisons around Petersburg this propaganda began to take effect. Under the slogan “all power to the Soviets”, the Bolsheviks had succeeded by July in recruiting to their banners large numbers of the city’s more radical elements.

The returning influx of Jewish exiles also greatly enhanced the position of the Bolsheviks. These exiles were not all originally Bolsheviks, but they were almost without exception extremists, and they had waited a long time for revolution to come: they were hungry for power. And they were inclined to favor the Bolsheviks because they were the most radical advocates of direct action. Trotsky, who had in 1905 began a Menshevik, and who had later been a “neutral,” immediately joined the Bolsheviks on his return from New York. So it was with many others.

Karl Radek (real name Sobelsohn) was one of the many Jewish revolutionaries who stirred up agitation among Russian people. Lenin began publishing a large number of periodicals, a total of 41, including 17 daily newspapers. The circulation of Pravda increased from 3,000 to 300,000 in May 1917. It was given to soldiers at the German front. Lenin had received money and instructions from the Polish Jew Jakub Fuerstenberg (real name Yakov Hanetsky) and from Alexander Parvus, and also from Hanetsky’s relative, the Jewess Yevgenia (Dora) Sumenson.

The Provisional Government was not originally a revolutionary body and was made up of former “liberal” members of the Tsar’s Imperial government and led by Count Georgy Lvov. Of its twelve members, only one, Alexander Kerensky, was a “Socialist.” The others were typical upper-middle class members of the Duma, with possibly mild leanings to the left. This 12 man government had sprung into being simply because no other semblance of a government existed in Petersburg on March 12^th — it did not in any way participate in the revolution. In the months following the overthrow of the Tsar, however, its power grew considerably, so that by July when an abortive Bolshevik uprising occurred, the Provisional Government was able to quell the affair and arrest or force into hiding the Bolshevik leaders.

Alexander Kerensky was vice-president and the only member of the Provisional Government who also belonged to the Petersburg Soviet. In the past Kerensky had cooperated closely with Mordekhai Bogrov, the assassin of Prime Minister Stolypin. So closely in fact that immediately after the murder, Kerensky fled the country in fear.

On July 17th anti-government agitation resulted in an unscheduled uprising by thousands of the city’s inflamed worker population. In Russian history these are known as the “July Days.” Kerensky, who by now had become the dominant figure in the Provisional Government dealt with the insurrection with considerable firmness. Whether Kerensky was responsible for ordering the mob fired on is unclear, but several hundred people were killed from July 17^th to July 20^th.

But one result of the “July Days” was the collapse of the Provisional Government under the premiership of Prince Lvov. And on July 21^st, Kerensky became Prime Minister of a “salvation of the revolution” government. Kerensky, a so-called democratic socialist, may have been running a caretaker government for the Bolsheviks.

On July 22^nd, Lenin and Zinoviev left St. Petersburg. Public opinion had been rising against the Bolsheviks as a result of their German (actually Jewish) financial deals. Trotsky, Lunacharsky, Kollontay, Kozlowski, Kamenev, and Sumenson were all arrested. But this was only done to calm the public. Kerensky began releasing arrested Bolsheviks less than a month later, as early as the 17th of August.

Supreme Commander of the Russian Army, General Lavr Kornilov, broke away and began plans to overthrow Kerensky. Left-wing leaders, mostly Jews, have always regarded Russia’s national patriots as the biggest threats to their international socialist world-view. Gen. Kornilov was arrested on September 14^th, but later escaped.

Kerensky continued to release Bolsheviks who were cleared of all charges and presented as defenders of democracy. In August (8^th-16^th) the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party held its Sixth Congress. This was the first one held since the London Congress of 1907, and it was the last one held before the Bolshevik Revolution, now only two months away. This Sixth Congress was completely a Bolshevik affair. The other factions merged with the Bolsheviks and ceased to exist; from this time on the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party was the Bolshevik Party. (Within a year the party officially changed its name to the Communist Party). The most important act of the Sixth Congress was to elect the “October Central Committee,” consisting of 26 members. This Central Committee was to rule the Bolshevik Party through the days of the October Revolution. Who were the principal members of the “October Central Committee”? Let us take the words of Leon Trotsky as they appear in his book, Stalin: “In view of the Party’s semi-legality the names of persons elected by secret ballot were not announced at the Congress, with the exception of the four who had received the largest number of votes. Lenin — 133 out of a possible 134, Zinoviev — 132, Kamenev — 131, Trotsky — 131.” [Trotsky, Stalin, pp. 220-221.] Two months before the October Revolution, these four were the top leaders of the Bolshevik Party. Three were Jews and the fourth, Lenin, was quarter-Jew.

Trotsky’s writings are extremely enlightening from a historical viewpoint. He hated Stalin and he wrote his book, Stalin, to prove that Stalin was a Johnnycome-lately, an upstart, and an usurper. He brings forth masses of evidence to show how unimportant Stalin was in Party councils during before and immediately after the October Revolution. In doing so, Trotsky again and again emphasizes who the really important leaders were. Trotsky cites numerous evidence to prove that Stalin was not an important figure in the Bolshevik Party in 1917. But in doing so he names the real leaders, who as before are the Jews, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Trotsky, and the up and coming Sverdlov. Lenin was the only gentile, or rather semi-gentile. These facts show why the Jewishness of communism is so immediately and indisputably apparent to anyone who has the slightest knowledge of Bolshevik history.

On August 17^th Kamenev was released from prison, and exactly a month later Trotsky was also freed by Kerensky. On Sept. 24^th Trotsky was elected president of the Petersburg Soviet. From this moment on the Bolsheviks were in control of the Petersburg Soviet. On October 29^th the Petersburg Soviet voted to transfer all military power to a “Military Revolutionary Committee,” headed by Trotsky. Revolution was now only days away.

On November 4^th, the Military Revolutionary Committee arranged mass meetings to prepare for the forthcoming revolt. On the following day the garrison of the Peter and Paul fortress, having succumbed to Jewish propaganda, declared an alliance with the Bolsheviks. Women’s battalion Military cadets in the Winter Palace and a women’s battalion were the only forces to stand against the Bolshevik coup.

Then, Lenin-Trotsky’s Bolsheviks led a Revolution and with just a handful of men seized control of the government. On November 7^th, the Bolsheviks seized power by taking over the Winter Palace. According to the Communists myth, 5,000 sailors had gathered outside the Palace earlier in the morning to “storm” it. In actual fact the Palace was taken over by a few hundred mostly Jewish revolutionaries. There was no real “storming” of the Palace. No blood was spilt.

Trotsky, somewhat of a Steven Spielberg, wanted the event to appear more dramatic than it actually was, so few shells were fired from the battleship Aurora but no shells ever struck the Winter Palace.

The Jew Kamenev became the first President of the “Soviet Republic.” Lenin became Premier. Trotsky was made Commissar of Foreign Affairs. Within a few days (on November 21^st) another Jew, Yakov Sverdlov, succeeded Jew Kamenev, and thus became the second Jewish president of the “Soviet Republic.” A relatively minor figure in Bolshevik circles six months before the revolution, he very quickly became one of the five top men in the party. Before his early death two years later he had become the party’s chief trouble-shooter and had assumed absolute control over Russia’s economic life.

On November 25^th, eight days after the Bolshevik coup, supposedly free elections were held throughout Russia under machinery set up by the Provisional Government. The Bolsheviks, not yet completely organized, made no attempt to interfere with the elections, but when it became clear that the Bolsheviks would command only a minority in the Constituent Assembly, they immediately laid plans to undermine its authority. The Provisional Government had specified that the convocation of the Assembly should be in the hands of a special commission. The Bolsheviks arrested this commission, and substituted for it a “Commissary for the Constituent Assembly,” headed by the Jew, Moisei Solomonovich Uritsky. By this tactic the Bolsheviks were able to exert their authority over the Assembly. When the Assembly did finally convene, the Jew, Sverdlov, although not even a delegate, took charge of the proceedings. Shortly thereafter Bolshevik troops brutally brought the Constituent Assembly to an end by ejecting the delegates and simply locking the doors to the building. This was the end of the Constituent Assembly. After having convened for only 13 hours, it disbanded, never to meet again. So ended Russia’s hope for a constitution and a representative government.

In March of 1918, the Soviet Government moved its capital from St. Petersburg to Moscow. In the same month the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party officially styled itself the Communist Party...

Such were the major events of — and those leading up to — what can rightfully be called the Jewish Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, a revolution that is deceitfully called a “Russian” Revolution. The Jewish names read like movie credits.

The Bolsheviks were not a visible political force at the time the Tsar abdicated. And they came to power not because the downtrodden masses of Russia called them back, but because very powerful Jewish Zionist forces in Europe and the United States sent them in.

It was initially puzzling to me that the violently anti-capitalist communists would be supported by some of the most prominent capitalists in the world. But I finally realized that Revolution in Russia was not ultimately about the triumph of an economic ideology, it was about the settling of an age-old struggle between the Jews and the Russians.

The fact that super-capitalists such as Schiff and Warburg could support Trotsky and Lenin made me question whether there was something more to Communism than met the eye. What was it about Communism that made it so attractive to Jews, who were largely well-educated non-proletarians, when Communism was supposed to be, in Lenin’s words, “a dictatorship of the proletariat”? Obviously, by-and-large, Jews were nothing like Marx’s “workers of the world,” for no group was more involved in capitalism or the manipulation and use of capital than the Jews.

Not long ago I read a book called Trotsky and the Jews, written by Joseph Nedava and published by the Jewish Publication Society (Philadelphia, 1971). The book points out that before the “Russian” Revolution, Trotsky used to play chess... with Baron Rothschild of the famous Rothschild banking family. A Jewish journalist Waldman who knew Trotsky from the period of his stay in Vienna said: “when he used to play chess with Baron Rothschild in Cafe Central and frequent Cafe Daily to read the press there”... What could the Rothschilds, the biggest banking house in Europe, possibly have in common with a radical revolutionary who wanted to destroy capitalism and private property??? Conversely, why would a dedicated Communist be a close friend of the most powerful “capitalist oppressor” in the world? Could it be that they saw Communism and Zionism as two very different avenues to a similar goal of power and revenge against the Russians?

A number of questions arose: 1) Could Communism simply have been a tool they adapted to defeat and rule their Russian antagonists? 2) Were there other peoples with whom the Jews believed they were in conflict? 3) Was Communism originally part of a strategic imperative that reached far beyond the confines of Soviet Russia? These were important questions.

Well, we don’t have enough time, of course, to answer all such huge questions, so better stick to our topic of today which is Jewish Zionist role in Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. But, my opinion is, yes, that Zionism and Communism were undoubtedly two sides of the same coin.

Although officially Jews have never made up more than five percent of Russia’s total population, they played a highly disproportionate and, no doubt, decisive role in Revolution and in the infant Bolshevik regime, effectively dominating the Soviet government during its early years. Soviet historians, along with most of their colleagues in the West, for decades preferred to ignore this subject. The facts, though, cannot be denied.

In the Communist seizure of power in Russia, the Jewish Zionist role was absolutely critical.

No doubt, the Zionists played an essential part in the revolutions of 1917. The Party, the State, the public organizations, the People’s Commissariats and other departments all had an overwhelmingly large number of Zionists among their top leaders. In summer of 1918, there were, in Petrograd alone, 271 Zionists in the highest echelon of power and only 17 non-Zionists. 265 of these 271 had come with Trotsky from New York. In practical terms, it was Trotsky, and not Lenin, who ruled the country.

Lenin’s name, of course, outweighs the others, although in the first year or so of the revolution, Trotsky’s fame rivaled his. Trotsky was considered no less the “father of the revolution”... After the Revolution, Leon Trotsky headed the Red Army and, for a time (1917-1924), was chief commissar of Soviet foreign affairs. The neoconservative American historian Paul Johnson has provocatively described Trotsky as the “executive agent” of the revolution, while Lenin was merely “the architect of the Putsch” of November 1917. [Johnson, History of the Jews, p. 450.] And so, as professor Albert Lindemann wrote, “Trotsky’s boundless self-confidence, his notorious arrogance, and sense of superiority were the traits often associated with Jews. Fantasies there were about Trotsky and other Bolsheviks, but there were also realities around which the fantasies grew.” [Albert S. Lindemann, Esau’s Tears: Modern Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 448]

Chaim Bermant in his book The Jews (1978) devotes a chapter to an aspect of Communism that is hardly generally known today, or at least not usually mentioned in the history books and encyclopedias. The author, himself obviously Jewish, writes with a certain authority and familiarity concerning his subject and can hardly be accused of the charge of “anti-Semitism” which is always leveled at anyone who offers any criticism, no matter how justified, of Jews and their ways. What does Bermant say? He writes, for example, that

To many outside observers, the Russian revolution looked like a Jewish conspiracy, especially when it was followed by Jewish-led revolutionary outbreaks in much of central Europe. The leadership of the Bolshevik Party had a preponderance of Jews and included Litvinov (real name Wallach), Liadov (Mandelshtam), Shklovsky, Saltz, Gusev (Drabkin), Zemliachka (Salkind), Helena Rozmirovich, Serafima Gopner, Yaroslavsky (Gubelman), Yaklovlev (Epstein), Riaznov (Goldendach), Uritsky and Larin. Of the seven members of the Politburo, the inner cabinet of the country, four, Trotsky (Bronstein), Zinoviev (Radomyslsky), Kamenev (Rosenfeld) and Sverdlov, were Jews.

Yes, virtually all of the important Bolshevik leaders were Jews. Lenin’s right-hand man was the Jew Grigory Radomyslsky (also known as Hirsch Apfelbaum), who used the name “Zinoviev.” He headed the Communist International (Comintern), the central agency for spreading communist revolution in other countries. Zinoviev said: “The eternal in the Russian revolution is the fact that it is the beginning of the world revolution.” [Quoted in Frederick Lewis Schuman, American Policy Toward Russia Since 1917: A Study of Diplomatic History, International Law and Public Opinion (New York: International Publishers, 1928), p. 231] Zinoviev “and his wife Z. I. Lilina were close family friends of Lenin, and Zinoviev probably received more personal letters from Lenin than any other leader,” writes Soviet General Dmitri Volkogonov in his sensational book about Lenin. [Dmitri Volkogonov, Lenin. A New Biography (New York: The Free Press, 1994), p. xxxv]

Similarly, Lev Borisovich Rosenfeld (better known as “Kamenev”) “received the most correspondence [from Lenin] ... He was much trusted by Lenin, even on personal matters, for example on Lenin’s relationship with his mistress Inessa Armand at the time he and Lenin were sharing an apartment in Poland. Kamenev’s knowledge of Lenin is important because he was the first editor, with Lenin’s direct participation, of Lenin’s collected works.” Kamenev headed the party newspaper, Pravda. [Dmitri Volkogonov, Lenin. A New Biography (New York: The Free Press, 1994), p. xxxv]

City and province of Yekaterinburg has been renamed “Sverdlovsk,” in honor of the Jew, Yakov Sverdlov, president of the “Soviet Republic” at the time of the execution of Tsar and family.

Other prominent Jews included press commissar Karl Radek (Sobelsohn), Adolf Yoffe who was head of the Revolutionary Military Committee of the Petrograd Bolshevik Party in 1917-18, Maxim Litvinov (Wallach) who became the best-known Soviet diplomat, foreign affairs commissar, and the ambassador to Britain, Grigory Sokolnikov, Yeroslavsky ............

Jews were very thick in every branch of communist government. The records show that 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, Latvians, Georgians and others. The Council of People’s Commissars consisted of 17 Jews and five others. Among the names of 556 high officials of the Bolshevik state officially published in 19181919 were 458 Jews and 108 others. Among the central committees of small, supposedly “Socialist” or other non-Communist parties (during that early period the semblance of “opposition” was permitted, to beguile the masses, accustomed under the Tsar to opposition parties) were 55 Jews and 6 others. [Douglas Reed, The Controversy of Zion (Durban, South Africa: Dolphin Press, 1978), p. 274]

Any effort to compose a comprehensive list of the most important Bolsheviks must be unavoidably subjective, but, as notes historian Albert Lindemann, “it seems beyond serious debate that in the first twenty years of the Bolshevik Party the top ten to twenty leaders included close to a majority of Jews. Of the seven ‘major figures’ listed in The Makers of the Russian Revolution, four are of Jewish origin.” [Albert S. Lindemann, Esau’s Tears: Modern Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 429430]

In 1990 a major New York publisher, the Free Press, a division of Simon & Schuster, published a book by Israeli historian Louis Rapoport called Stalin’s War Against the Jews. In it the author casually admits what we Gentiles are not supposed to know: “Many Jews were euphoric over their high representation in the new government. Lenin’s first Politburo was dominated by men of Jewish origins…” [Louis Rapoport, Stalin's War against the Jews: The Doctors' Plot and the Soviet Solution (New York: The Free Press, 1990)]

Robert Wilton, correspondent of the London Times, who experienced the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, indicated: “Taken according to numbers of population, the Jews represented one in ten; among the commissars that rule Bolshevist Russia they are nine in ten; if anything the proportion of Jews is still greater.” [Quoted in Douglas Reed, The Controversy of Zion (Durban, South Africa: Dolphin Press, 1978), p. 276]

The Zionists started on their task of establishing a Promised Land for themselves — in Russia and by using the slaves who inhabited Russia, of course. In this process, Trotsky was in favour of seizing power over the world, of carrying out a “worldwide revolution.” This is Trotsky’s theory of “permanent revolution.”

The various ethnic groups inhabiting Russia were to be slain, thus enabling the Zionists to conquer the whole world.

Igor Shafarevich, a famous Russian mathematician and member of even the prestigious U.S. National Academy of Sciences, argues that the reason why Jews occupied so many top leadership positions during the Bolshevik Revolution and that their activities during this period and later were motivated by hostility to Russians and Russian culture. [Igor Shafarevich, “Russophobia,” Nash Sovremennik (Moscow), June and November, 1989. Translation JPRS-UPA-90115, March 22, 1990, pp. 2-37.]

Shafarevich claims that Jews were critically involved in actions that destroyed traditional Russian institutions. He stresses the Jewish role in liquidating Russian nationalists and undermining Russian patriotism, murdering the Tsar and his family, and destroying the Orthodox Church. He views Jewish “Russophobia” not as a unique phenomenon, but as resulting from traditional Jewish hostility toward the gentile world considered as tref (unclean) and toward gentiles themselves considered as sub-human and as worthy of destruction. Shafarevich reviews Jewish literary works during the Soviet and post-Soviet period indicating hatred toward Russia and its culture mixed with a powerful desire for revenge. Reflecting the cultural domination theme of anti-Semitism, Shafarevich claims that Jews have had more influence on Russia than perhaps any other country, but that discussion of the role of Jews either in contemporary Russia or even in the theoretically more open United States is prohibited in principle. Indeed, Shafarevich states that any possibility that Jewish interests conflict with the interests of others cannot even be proposed as an hypothesis. After he said this in his book, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences asked Shafarevich to resign his position in the academy but he refused. Shafarevich was a leading dissident during the final decades of Soviet rule. A prominent human rights activist, he was a founding member of the Committee on the Defense of Human Rights in the USSR. [See Science 257, 1992, p. 743; The Scientist, 6, 19, 1992, p. 1. Cited in Kevin MacDonald, Separation and its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998), p. 60]

Occasionally, even today (despite censorship and so-called “politcorrectness”) even some Jewish historians still openly acknowledge disproportionate Jewish involvement in Russian communism.

Norman Cantor, professor of history at New York University, for example, provides confirmation of Jewish prominence in all important areas of the communist government: “The founders of the Soviet secret police (later KGB), headquartered in Lubyanka prison in Moscow, were mostly Jews.” Skeptics should pay particular attention to this bragging paragraph:

“During the heyday of the Cold War, American Jewish publicists spent a lot of time denying that — as 1930s anti-Semites claimed — Jews played a disproportionately important role in Soviet and world Communism. The truth is until the early 1950s Jews did play such a role, and there is nothing to be ashamed of. In time, Jews will learn to take pride in the record of the Jewish Communists in the Soviet Union and elsewhere. It was a species of striking back.” [Norman F. Cantor, “Stalin’s Jews”, in The Jewish Experience: An Illustrated History of Jewish Culture & Society (Castle Books, 1996), pp. 364.]

October 6, 2006

Well-informed observers, both inside and outside of Russia, immediately took note at the time of the crucial Jewish role in Bolshevism. No less a figure than Winston Churchill spoke out clearly about the Jewish communism. In a full-page feature article in the February 8, 1920, issue of London’s Illustrated Sunday Herald, Churchill wrote:

This movement among the Jews is not new. From the days of Spartacus-Weisshaupt to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky in Russia, Bela Kun in Hungary, Rosa Luxembourg in Germany, and Emma Goldman in the United States, this world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilization and the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality has been steadily growing. . . . 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 actual 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. With the notable exception of Lenin, the majority of the leading figures are Jews. Moreover, the principal inspiration and driving power comes from the Jewish leaders. Thus Tchitcherin, a pure Russian, is eclipsed by his nominal subordinate Litvinoff, and the influence of Russians like Bukharin or Lunacharski cannot be compared with the power of Trotsky or of Zinovieff . . . or of Krassin or Radek — all Jews. In the Soviet institutions the predominance of Jews is even more astonishing. And the prominent, if not indeed the principal, part in the system of terrorism applied by the Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution [the Cheka] has been taken by Jews, and in some notable cases by Jewesses. The same evil prominence was obtained by Jews in the brief period of terror during which Bela Kun ruled in Hungary. The same phenomenon has been presented in Germany (especially in Bavaria), so far as this madness has been allowed to prey upon the temporary prostration of the German people. Although in all these countries there are many non-Jews every whit as bad as the worst of the Jewish revolutionaries, the part played by the latter in proportion to their numbers in the population is astonishing.

While some people, who try to deny such Jewish involvement in Communism, will concede that Trotsky (as well as Kamenev, Zinovyev, Sverdlov, and other Bolshevik top leaders) were indeed Jewish, while at the same time denying any otherwise significant Jewish involvement in Communism, no one can really deny the communist-Jewish connection as clearly exposed, for example, in diplomatic correspondence that passed between American government representatives in Russia and Washington D.C. during the time of the Bolshevik take-over of Russia, which clearly identify Jews as the leaders of Bolshevism. The following few quotes, for example, are taken directly from documents available at the U.S. Archives.

In the War Records Division of the United States National Archives, for example, there is filed a report from an American Intelligence operative in Russia. From the Headquarters of the American Expeditionary Forces, on March 1, 1919, comes this telegram from Omsk by Chief of Staff, Capt. Montgomey Shuyler who wrote: “It is probably unwise to say this loudly in the United States but the Bolshevik movement is and has been since its beginning guided and controlled by Russian Jews of the greasiest type.”

A second Schuyler telegram, dated June 9, 1919 from Vladivostok, reports on the make-up of the presiding Soviet government: “There were 384 ‘commissars’ including 2 negroes, 13 Russians, 15 Chinamen, 22 Armenians, AND MORE THAN 300 JEWS. Of the latter number, 264 had come to Russia from the United States since the downfall of the Imperial Government.”

Also in the U.S. National Archives are two telegrams sent by American diplomats from Russia. State Department document 861.00/1757 sent on May 2, 1918, by U.S. Consul in Moscow Mr. Summers relates, “Jews predominant in local Soviet government, anti-Jewish feeling growing among population.” State Department Document 861.00/2205 from Consul Caldwell in Vladivostok on July 5, 1918, describes, “Fifty per cent of Soviet government in each town consists of Jews of worst type.”

David R. Francis, United States ambassador in Russia, warned in a January 1918 dispatch to Washington: “The Bolshevik leaders here, most of whom are Jews and 90 percent of whom are returned exiles, care little for Russia or any other country but are internationalists and they are trying to start a worldwide social revolution.”

Likevise, the Netherlands’ ambassador in Russia, M. Oudendyke, made much the same point a few months later. A report, sent by Mr. Oudendyke said that “Bolshevism is organised and worked by Jews.” The report was included in a pamphlet published as a U.S. government White Paper in April 1919 entitled Russia No. 1 (1919) A Collection of Reports on Bolshevism in Russia. So, as we

can see, for many observers the Bolsheviks became the embodiment of the Jewish revolutionaries. Some opponents perhaps will claim that the preceding sources are “anti-Semitic” and therefore unconvincing, but they’d be wrong. Therefore, now, let’s see what the Jews themselves were saying?

November 17, 2006

Someone, quoted in that Register-Guard article (Jeff Wright, “Pacifica Lectures Decried as Anti-Semitic,” The Register-Guard, October 11, 2006, pp. A1, A9), described my previous lecture (about Red Terror) as “chilling” and I hope that it really was so. I wanted, I intended it to be not only chilling but horrifying — all those photos of corpses, victims of Red Terror, prisoners, executions, torture, dying children, and so on...

Isn’t that odd that when we continually hear so much about “holocaust,” about Auschwitz, when Jewish community’s organizations are using their political influence to have laws passed in a number of states requiring school kids to take mandatory courses about the “holocaust,” what happened in Kolyma or Vorkuta or Solovki is never even mentioned in American school? The excuse given for requiring students to study the “holocaust” is that it was “the greatest crime in history,” and we should know about it so that we won’t repeat it. But then why shouldn’t we learn also about the Great Terror in Russia, atrocities where millions of people were the victims, and so the lesson should be even more pertinent for everyone today?

You know, I’m not trying to be funny or sarcastic about this. We all know the answers to these questions, but I just want you to think about their significance. To them, Auschwitz is important because Jews died there, and Kolyma is not important, because their own Frenkels and Bermans and Rapoports were bosses there. They were no less than founding fathers of Gulag! The Zionists keep rubbing our noses in Auschwitz, because they want us to feel guilty, they want us to feel that we owe the Jews something for letting it happen. The media rarely mention Gulag because Jews were the guilty ones there. Besides, today they make a lot of money by promoting the “holocaust.” As saying goes, “There is no business as good as Shoa business”... It’s certainly not going to help Zionists to divide the attention and the sympathy of the American public between Auschwitz and Gulag. And it’s certainly not going to help their effort to extort billions of dollars in “holocaust” reparations from Germany, from the Swiss, and from everyone else if they admitted their own guilt for Great Terror in Russia. Even more importantly, the “holocaust” story is used as sword and shield for IsraHell, that cancer tumor on Middle East.

The Zionist Jews are hiding behind that perpetual victim status and thus receiving much undeserved sympathy. The world knows of Anne Frank but do you know of all the Russian young girls killed under the leadership of Jewish Bolsheviks, starting with the Czar’s daughters? The Jews are the only group that has never had to answer for crimes against humanity nor make reparations. The world has yet to receive an apology much less an acknowledgement they (the Jewish Communists) led the largest campaign of genocide in 20th century!

On the occasion of his receiving the left-wing German Ludwig-Börne-Prize for outstanding performances in literature, the American-Jewish scholar George Steiner said in his thank-you speech: “In my opinion there can be no higher honor, no higher nobility, than to belong to a people who has never engaged in persecution. Since my childhood I have been proud not to have that arrogance. I belong to the highest race because it does not persecute others. We are the only ones; we never had the power to do so. Alleluia!” [Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 31 May 2003, German original is available on the Internet as George Steiner, „Wir alle sind Gäste des Lebens und der Wahrheit“, <http://www.niemandsland.koblenzerjugendtheater.de/brisant/george_steiner.htm> English translation from Wolfgang Strauss, “The End of the Legends,” The Revisionist 2(3) (2004), pp. 342-351, <http://www.vho.org/tr/2004/3/Strauss342351.html>]

Never persecuted others? Never held power? Really??? This is exactly what they call chutzpa! There is a joke that “chutzpa” means when someone kills his father and mother, then asks the court for mercy because he is an orphan...

“The Jewish commissar with the leather jacket and Mauser pistol, often speaking broken Russian, is the typical image of revolutionary power.” This statement comes from Sonya Margolina, who is proud to be “the daughter of a Jewish Bolshevik.” Margolina today lives in Berlin. Her book Das Ende der Lügen: Rußland und die Juden im 20. Jahrhundert, from which I just cited, follows it with these words: “The tragedy of Jewry is that there was no political option to escape the vengeance for the historical sin of the Jews, namely, their enthusiastic cooperation with the Communist regime. The victory of the Soviet regime saved them for a while, but vengeance still lurked ahead.” [Sonja Margolina, Das Ende der Lügen: Rußland und die Juden im 20. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Siedler Verlag, 1992). English translation from Wolfgang Strauss, “The End of the Legends,” The Revisionist 2(3) (2004), pp. 342-351, <http://www.vho.org/tr/2004/3/Strauss342-351.html>.]

Even such celebrated Zionist historian as Richard Pipes (daddy of Daniel Pipes) links the “holocaust” ultimately to the perception that the Bolshevik revolution was dominated by Jews: “The Jewish Holocaust thus turned out to be one of the many unanticipated and unintended consequences of the Russian Revolution.” [Richard Pipes, Russia under the Bolshevik Regime (New York: Knopf, 1993), p. 258.]

So let’s go back now to Soviet Russia of the 1920s and 1930s.

As another celebrated historian, Paul Johnson, said: “More than anyone else, Trotsky symbolized the violence and daemonic power of Bolshevism and its determination to inflame the world. More than anyone, he was responsible for the popular identification of revolution with the Jews.” [Paul Johnson, A History of the Jews (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), p. 451]

When Trotsky was addressing the delegates of the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets on December 1, 1917, he warned that “in less than a month, this terror is going to take extremely violent forms, just as it did during the great French Revolution. Not only prison awaits our enemies, but the guillotine, that remarkable invention of the French Revolution which has the capacity to make a man a whole head shorter.” [Delo naroda, 3 December 1917, quoted in Stéphane Courtois, et al., The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 59]

Trotsky was very (extremely!) enthusiastic about the reign of terror that swept Russia. He wrote in January of 1919: “Terror as the demonstration of the will and strength of the working class is historically justified...” [Izvestia, January 10, 1919.] During a speech at the International Communist Congress in Moscow the following March he said: “Blood and mercilessness must be our slogans.” [Quoted in David McCalden, “The Hidden Hand: Leon Trotsky,” <http://www.redwatch.net/trotsky.html>] Later, to explain away the bloody slaughter of the rebellious Kronstadt sailors he wrote: “Idealists and pacifists always accused the Revolution of excesses. But the main point is that ‘excesses’ flow from the very nature of revolution which in itself is but an ‘excess’ of history.” [Quoted in Abbie Bakan, “Kronstadt and the Russian Revolution,” Marxism, No. 1, 2003, <http://www.web.net/sworker/Journal/m2003/17Kronstadt.html>] Trotsky actually even wrote a book titled The Defence of Terrorism in which he said: “The man who recognizes the revolutionary historic importance of the very fact of the existence of the Soviet system must also sanction the Red Terror.” [Leon Trotsky, The Defence of Terrorism (London: Labor Publishing Company and George Allen & Unwin, 1920), p. 64]

This cold, calculating, and cynical cruelty, the logical result of an implacable class war pushed to its extreme, was shared by other Jewish Priests of Terror as well. Other luminaries in the Jewish-Bolshevik heavens took up the Trotsky’s refrain. Hirsch Apfelbaum (who entered the history books as Grigory Zinovev), one of the main Jewish Bolshevik leaders, declared in September 1918: “To dispose of our enemies, we will have to create our own socialist terror.” [Severnaya Kommuna, no. 109 (19 September 1918), p. 2, quoted The Black Book of Communism, p. 75]

He penned a charming article in the Krasnaya Gazeta (1 September 1918) under the rubric “Blood for Blood”:

“We will make our hearts cruel, hard and immovable, so that no mercy will enter them, and so that they will not quiver at the sight of a sea of enemy blood. We will let loose the floodgates of that sea. Without mercy, without sparing, we will kill our enemies in scores of hundreds. Let them be thousands; let them drown themselves in their own blood! Let there be floods of blood of the bourgeois — more blood! As much as possible!” [Quoted in “Red Terror” <http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/RUSterror.htm>]

He then proclaimed the mass death sentence: “The bourgeoisie can kill some individuals, but we can murder whole classes of people.” [Quoted in Wolfgang Strauss, “The End of the Legends,” The Revisionist 2(3) (2004), pp. 342-351, <http://www.vho.org/tr/2004/3/Strauss342-351.html>] Apfelbaum wanted to send ten million Russians (ten out of each one hundred) to the smoldering ovens of the class war. His pronouncement of 17 September 1918 sounds almost unbelievable in its monstrosity; Apfelbaum-Zinoviev formulated this holocaust sentence: “From the population of a hundred million in Soviet Russia, we must win over ninety million to our side. We have nothing to say to the others. They have to be exterminated.” [Quoted in The Black Book of Communism, p. 76]

Eventually almost all the resistance to Bolshevik regime in Russia was crushed. Any further opposition was brutally suppressed by the Soviet secret police. The society which Bolsheviks began to build had to resort to unrestrained violence, in order to survive. As the highest principle of revolutionary development, the dictatorship trampled and subordinated everything to its own will. Trotsky did not merely inspire revolutionary terror, he was also the first to make it into a state institution.

Trotsky & Co. then turned attention toward fomenting similar Communist takeovers in other countries.

Jewish preponderance in communism was by that time evident also everywhere outside of Russia and first became absolutely obvious during the short-lived communist takeover of Hungary in the spring of 1919 led by the Jew, Béla Kun (a variant of Cohen).

While the Communist Party Congress was in session in March 1919, the formation of the Hungarian Soviet Republic was announced. The Congress erupted in ecstasy and asked Lenin to send its greetings to Budapest, which he gladly did: “Our Congress is convinced that the time is not far off when Communism will be victorious throughout the world. ... Long live the international Communist Republic!” [Dmitri Volkogonov, Lenin: A New Biography (New York: The Free Press, 1994), p. 395]

As notes Jewish scholar Howard Sachar, “for 135 days [in 1919], Hungary was ruled by a Communist dictatorship. Its party boss, Béla Kun, was a Jew. So were 31 of the 49 commissars in Kun’s regime.” [Howard M. Sachar, Diaspora: An Inquiry into the Contemporary Jewish World (New York: Harper and Row, 1985), p. 339] Historian Richard Pipes claims that 95% of Kuhn’s regime was composed of Jews. “The government of Béla Kun was composed almost entirely of Jews who held administrative offices,” says also Encyclopedia Britannica. [page 517, vol. 13, 1946.]

During the three month regime, the country was turned upside down in a reign of murder and terror. Soon a Terror Group of the Revolutionary Council of the Government was formed and quickly became known as “Lenin’s Boys.” Its leader was Tibor Szamuely, the most radical of all Hungary’s Jewish communists. Historians attribute some 80 of the 129 recorded deaths to “Lenin’s Boys,” but it is likely that the real number was at least several hundred. [The Black Book of Communism, p. 274]

In an amazingly frank report, the New International Year Book of 1919 (page 587) has summarized the situation:

One of the chief weaknesses in the new regime was antipathy to the Jews. In the country districts the feeling was widespread that the revolution had been a movement on the part of the Jews to seize the power for themselves, and the remark was frequently heard that if the Jews of Budapest died of starvation, so much the better for the rest of the country.

And it was this factor which quickly brought about the regime’s downfall, as the ordinary Hungarians detested Jewish dictatorship. Béla Kun was deposed and interned in a lunatic asylum. Eventually he was released and fled to Russia where he became chief of the secret police, the Cheka, in southern Russia, in Crimea. Béla Kun, notes Jewish scholar Louis Rapoport, “a Jew, [was] the cruel tyrant of the 1919 Communist revolution in Hungary and later Stalin’s chief of terror in the Crimea.” [Louis Rapoport, Stalin’s War against the Jews: The Doctors’ Plot and the Soviet Solution (New York: The Free Press, 1990), p. 56] There he distinguished himself by executing officers from Wrangel’s army who had agreed to surrender if their lives would be spared. Szamuely attempted to flee to Austria but was arrested and committed suicide soon afterward. [The Black Book of Communism, p. 275]

While Kun and Szamuely terrorized Hungary, a Budapest lawyer, Ernst Bettelheim, had the approval and funding of the Comintern to set up an Austrian Communist Party. Bettelheim and his followers planned to seize control of the nerve centers of the government, while Kun sent the Red Hungarian army to the Austrian border (only two hours’ march from Vienna), ready to invade to support their comrades. The night before the planned rising, on June 14, 1919, however, the Austrian police arrested all of Austrian Communist leadership; a march of 4000 Communists to free them broke under police fire. The Austrian revolution had been decapitated. This uprising by the Communist “Red Guard” was led by Egon Kisch, a Prague-born Jewish journalist. With the failure of the uprising he was imprisoned and then expelled from Austria. In later years he fought with the Spanish Republicans against Franco, and having emigrated first to New York and then to Mexico, returned after the Second World War to became president of the Prague Jewish community.

In Germany, the Jewish communists also tried to take over there in the chaos that followed the First World War. The Jewish Communist leaders in Russia were involved from the start. Trotsky dispatched a team of his most able revolutionaries lead by Karl Radek, one of the most powerful Jewish men in the Communist movement, to infiltrate Germany. Aided by funds from the Soviet Ambassador Adolf Ioffe, the Spartacists, led by Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, Leo Jogiches, and Clara Zetkin (all Jewish) attempted to overthrow the German government in 1919. Historian Paul Johnson writes about Rosa Luxemburg:

The most representative of them was Rosa Luxemburg. She came from Zamosc in Russian Poland and her historical background was impeccably Jewish. She was descended from rabbis going back to at least the twelfth century, and her mother, the daughter and sister of rabbis, quoted the Bible to her endlessly. [Johnson, A History of the Jews, p. 448]

Soon the revolt had been crushed and its leaders, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, had been captured and executed.

As if there had not been enough trouble in Germany already, a turbulent and bloody episode seized Munich, where a number of Jews were at the forefront of the attempt to impose Communist rule. This Communist-inspired coup in Bavaria had far greater success. It began with the seizure of power by a Jewish radical, Kurt Eisner, who proclaimed a socialist republic in Bavaria. The Jewishness of Kurt Eisner is described by historian John Toland in his famous book, Adolf Hitler:

In Munich another insurrection broke out on November 7. It was led by Kurt Eisner, a small elderly Jew wearing a black floppy hat which, large as it was, couldn’t contain a shock of wild hair. Epically untidy, he was a living cartoon of the bomb-throwing Red. [John Toland, Adolf Hitler (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc.), p. 76.]

Then, upon his assassination, Eisner’s government was replaced by another, again radical socialist one. Eisner was succeeded as Prime Minister of Bavaria by another, even more extreme Jewish revolutionary, Gustav Landauer. But he also was killed soon. With Eisner and Landauer dead, a third German Jew, Ernst Toiler, a neurotic young poet, emerged as a leader of the Bavarian revolution. A few ragtag revolutionaries took up arms and declared Bavaria as Soviet Republic. Erich Mühsam was yet another Jew in high position in the government. Erich Mühsam was the one who said about himself:

I am a Jew and will remain a Jew so long as I live. I never denied my Judaism and never even walked out of the religious community (because I would still remain a Jew and I am completely indifferent under which rubric I am entered in the state’s register). I consider it neither an advantage nor a disadvantage to be a Jew; it simply belongs to my being like my red beard, my weight, or my inclinations. [Erich Mühsam, Briefe 1900-1934 2 Bde. (Darmstadt: Topos, 1984), vol. 2, pp. 422-3. English translation from Stephen Eric Bronner, “Persistent Memories of the German Revolution: The Jewish Activists of 1919,” New Politics, vol. 5, no. 2 (new series), no. 18, Winter 1995, <http://www.wpunj.edu/~newpol/issue18/bronne18.htm>]

Later on, as troops loyal to the government in Berlin moved against Toiler’s forces, yet another revolutionary regime — the Second Bavarian Soviet Republic

— was declared in Munich. Its leader was Eugen Leviné, a Russian-born Jew who announced in triumph that “the sun of world revolution has risen.” As British journalist and historian John Cornwell describes it, “After a week or two of outlandish misrule, ... a reign of terror ensued under the red revolutionary trio of Max Levien, Eugen Leviné, and Tobias Axelrod to hasten the dictatorship of the proletariat. The new regime kidnapped ‘middle-class’ hostages, throwing them into Stadeheim Prison. They shut down schools, imposed censorship, and requisitioned peoples’ homes and possessions.” [John Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII (New York: Viking, 1999), p. 74]

When Béla Kun established a “dictatorship of the proletariat” in Budapest, Hungary, it excited those Jewish communists in Germany who believed in a domino theory of revolution and who still believed that revolution must be imminent in Germany.

In Moscow, news from Munich was encouraging. The Bolshevik head of the Communist International, Grigory Zinoviev, believed that within a few months the communists would win in Germany. But Communist risings in Germany did not go nearly as far as Kun’s in Hungary. In a matter of days, the German patriotic Free Corps defeated the revolutionaries and took power in Munich. The Munich Soviet was crushed, and a month later its leader Leviné was executed. Ernst Toller was captured also, but he escaped and lived to write plays. He became a screenwriter in Hollywood, and in 1939 he hanged himself in New York. Of his Jewishness he had written, in words which many Jewish revolutionaries committed to a new world order could have echoed: “A Jewish mother bore me, Germany nursed me, Europe educated me, the earth is my homeland, the world my fatherland.” [Quoted in Martin Gilbert, The Jews in the Twentieth Century (New York: Schocken Books, 2001), p. 108]

The revolutionaries, in a desperate attempt to avert defeat, took hostages, most of them civilians. Adolf Hitler, still serving as a corporal in the Second Bavarian Infantry Regiment, was reportedly among those who managed to avoid being taken. Ten of the sixteen hostages were then killed. One of those in Munich at the time was the Papal Nuncio, Cardinal Pacelli, later Pope Pius XII, for whom the “bestial hostage murder” blackened the name of both Jews and Communists. And, as celebrated Jewish British historian Sir Martin Gilbert says, “Hitler, who might so easily have been a victim of the Red Terror, saw in the Jewish leadership of the revolution proof of the destructive, anti-patriotic nature of Jewry.” [Martin Gilbert, The Jews in the Twentieth Century (New York: Schocken Books, 2001), p. 107]

“There has been a tendency to circumvent or simply ignore the significant role of Jewish intellectuals in the German Communist Party, and thereby seriously neglect one of the genuine and objective reasons for increased anti-Semitism during and after World War I,” says Sarah Gordon in her book Hitler, Germans and the “Jewish Question”. And then she continues: “The prominence of Jews in the revolution and early Weimar Republic is indisputable, and this was a very serious contributing cause for increased anti-Semitism in post-war years. It is clear then that the stereotype of Jews as socialists and communists led many Germans to distrust the Jewish minority as a whole and to brand Jews as enemies of the German nation.” [Sarah Gordon, Hitler, Germans and the “Jewish Question” (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 23.]

So communist revolution failed in Hungary, Austria, and Germany. It also failed in parts of the former Russian Empire itself: in Finland and the Baltic countries, including Lithuania, patriots defeated Communists and set up independent non-Communist governments. But, in independent Lithuania, between two world wars, Jews were heavily (enormously!) overrepresented in underground subversive movement, in Soviet spy rings. It’s known that at least two-thirds of members of underground Communist Party in Lithuania at that time (before WWII) were Jewish. When Soviets invaded Lithuania in 1940 and Red Army occupied it, and Lithuania was annexed, and became part of Soviet Union, of course all those Jewish communists were triumphant. Then, I remember I lived for many years on a street that had name of one of those Jewish communists and I was always embarrassed when someone asked me where I live and I had to say that I lived on Greifenberger Street...

Now let’s back to Russia. The fullest expression of Trotsky’s role always was, yes, in relation to the question of world revolution, a matter to which he devoted unprecedented effort.

A world revolution, however, needed a world instrument. Apart from the Russian Communist Party, radical subversive organizations in other countries were in a relatively embryonic stage. At the very moment when Béla Kun and his companions were attempting to set up a second Soviet state, Trotsky and Lenin decided to establish an international organization whose aim was to spread the revolution throughout the world. Communists from other countries were invited to assemble for a conference in Moscow in March 1919. They decided that “the international Communist conference would create the Third Communist International,” known henceforth as Comintern. Seventeen delegates signed the manifesto, and set their task: to struggle for the world dictatorship of the proletariat. [Volkogonov, Lenin, p. 390] From its inception, this body became a cover and a tool of the Communist Party’s activities in the international arena. The Communist International would control all of the world’s communist movements.

Hopes of world revolution ran high. Lenin said that the “victory of the world communist revolution is assured.” Their aims were to create a single world-wide Communist Party and to overthrow the “international bourgeoisie” by force to create “an international Soviet Republic.”

Zinoviev was appointed a president of this central agency for spreading communist revolution in other countries. He claimed time and again that the victory of Communist revolution in Europe was guaranteed, and that the Red Flag would soon be flying over all continents. He saw his primary task as helping to ferment armed uprisings wherever “the revolutionary situation was ripening.” [Volkogonov, Lenin, p. 391] Zinoviev said: “The eternal in the Russian revolution is the fact that it is the beginning of the world revolution.” [Quoted in Frederick Lewis Schuman, American Policy Toward Russia Since 1917: A Study of Diplomatic History, International Law and Public Opinion (New York: International Publishers, 1928), p. 231] Well, sounds just as American Rabbi Lewis Browne who said that “We intend to remake the Gentiles by doing what the communists are doing in Russia.” [Lewis Browne, How Odd of God: An Introduction to the Jews (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1934)]

While the German police and troops were rounding up scattered conspirators, Zinoviev was in Moscow, shouting from the platform: “Arm yourselves, German proletarians! Wherever you can get hold of a gun, take it! Form Soviets! Build a Red Army! Long live the proletarian revolution in Germany and the whole world!” And he was trying to convince the Politburo that “the leaven of world revolution” was already at work in the main capitalist countries. [Volkogonov, Lenin, p. 391]

The Central Committee, meanwhile, was preparing the program for new parties, formulating the “Twenty-one Conditions” for admission to Comintern, and sending trunkloads of gold and other valuables to Germany, Italy, Hungary and elsewhere in order to foment revolution. The Bolshevik leadership believed fanatically that, the torch of revolution having been lit in Russia, the ancient edifice of civilization would soon be engulfed in flames and burn to the ground like an old wooden barn. [Volkogonov, Lenin, p. 391]

On 6 March 1920, at a ceremony marking the first anniversary of the founding of Comintern, Lenin gave a “guarantee that the victory of the Communist revolution is inevitable ... and that it is not too far off.” The Bolsheviks planned not merely to control but also to create revolutionary situations through Comintern. For this purpose, from the very beginning, Lenin and Trotsky and Zinoviev had to shift the entire financial burden of the “international Communist Party” onto the shoulders of plundered, starving, half-stifled Soviet Russia. As early as 8 October 1918, the Central Committee had created a Russian Communist Party Bureau for “foreign work”... All financial operations were conducted through the Bureau, under Zinoviev... Karl Radek was in charge of Bolshevik relations with foreign Communist delegations... [Volkogonov, Lenin, pp. 391-392]

Moscow was handing out money to foreign communists, millions of gold roubles, dollars, pounds, marks, lire, crowns and so on, all raised by selling off the tsarist gold reserves, the valuables looted from the churches and confiscated from the bourgeoisie. Jewish Bolshevik Osip Pyatnitsky was in charge of Comintern’s hard-currency chest. [Volkogonov, Lenin, p. 393]

In May 1919 the Politburo gave routine authorization for a collection of valuable jewelry to be made available to Comintern. The list of this jewelry runs to many pages and is valued in many millions of roubles, with items marked “for England,” “for Holland,” “for France,” and so on.” [Volkogonov, Lenin, p. 69] The total quantity of valuables collected is unknown, but the contents of one list of items collected up to 1 November 1922 provides an idea of the scale of operations: 1220 pounds of gold, 828,275 pounds of silver, 35,670 diamonds, 71,762 items of unspecified valuables, 536 pounds of gemstones, 3115 gold roubles, 19,155 silver roubles, 1902 “various precious objects.” It also says: “In addition to the church valuables listed above, 964 antique objects were collected and will be valued.” Once in Moscow, the boxes were sorted before dispatch to the State Repository: part of the loot was put at the immediate disposal of the Politburo for the Comintern fund. [Volkogonov, Lenin, p. 381]

The Bolsheviks were robbing the churches and using tsarist gold reserves, ostensibly to purchase grain from abroad, but in reality to finance revolution throughout the world and to force the creation of more and more new Communist Parties. The number of agents abroad to whom very large sums of money in local denominations were sent — virtually from the moment the Bolsheviks took power

— is countless. For instance, on 20 April 1922 the Politburo accepted a forecast budget of 3,150,600 gold roubles for Comintern activities for the year. A week later, Zinoviev, a chairman of Comintern, tabled a paper on the budget, and the previous week’s forecast was revised upwards by a further reserve of 400,000 gold roubles as a first installment. Zinoviev explained that he needed 100,000 gold roubles at once “for agitation among the Japanese troops.” [Volkogonov, Lenin, p. 50] On the other hand, in November of 1921 the Politburo unanimously rejected an appeal from a special commission for the improvement of children’s rations. [Volkogonov, Lenin, p. 69]

While millions were dying of hunger and disease, the Politburo was lavishly disbursing tsarist gold to ignite revolution in other countries. The ruined countryside was incapable of feeding the population. Famine was beginning to break out in many provinces, and the workers in the towns were receiving a miserable ration of bread. Thirty-six million people were starving, thousands dying every day, and yet on 7 December 1922 the Politburo took the decision to export almost a million tones of grain. As famous Russian philosopher Nikolay Berdyaev put it: “There is something other-worldly in the Bolsheviks, something alien. That is what makes them terrifying.” [Nikolay Berdyaev, Novoe Srednevekovye (Berlin, 1924), p. 89, quoted in Volkogonov, Lenin, p. 345] The country was starving, and yet the government was selling vast quantities of grain abroad!

The Bolsheviks hung onto power only by the use of relentless terror, driven by the urge to carry the civil war as fast as possible to other countries. It was their firm conviction that their supporters abroad would only come to power by the use of force and terror. In the Manifesto of the Second Comintern Congress, this was clearly stated: “The Communist International cannot admit those organizations which, while including the dictatorship of the proletariat in their programmes, continue a policy plainly aimed at the peaceful resolution of the historic crisis.” [Volkogonov, Lenin, p. 397]

While the Second Comintern Congress was in session in the summer of 1920, the Bolsheviks launched a military campaign to take Poland. Zinoviev had arranged for a vast political map of the world to be hung on the stage of the Bolshoi Theatre, where “the world party of the socialist revolution” was in session. Every morning the delegates watched as little red flags were moved to show the progress of the Reds, while Zinoviev gave an excited commentary, promising that their next Congress would take place in Berlin, then in Paris, then London... His words were drowned in a storm of applause. [Volkogonov, Lenin, p. 281]

On 30 of August, 1918, Lenin was speaking at a Moscow factory. As Lenin left the building and before he entered his car, some woman called out to him.

When Lenin turned towards her, she fired three shots. One passed through Lenin’s coat, the other two hit him in the left shoulder and left lung.

The woman was Jewish and her name was Faina Yefimovna Kaplan (also known as Fanny Kaplan and as Dora Kaplan or Feiga Chaimovna Roytblat-Kaplan). She was a member of the Party of Socialist Revolutionaries.

Lenin was taken back to his living quarters at the Kremlin. He feared there might be other plotters planning to kill him and refused to leave the security of the Kremlin to seek medical attention. Doctors were brought in to treat him but were unable to remove the bullets outside of a hospital. But despite the severity of his injuries, Lenin survived. However, Lenin’s health never fully recovered from the attack and it is believed the shooting contributed to the strokes that incapacitated and later killed him.

Kaplan was taken into custody and interrogated by the Cheka. She made the following statement: “My name is Fanya Kaplan. Today I shot at Lenin. I did it on my own. I will not say whom I obtained my revolver. I will give no details. I had resolved to kill Lenin long ago. I consider him a traitor to the Revolution.” [“Fanny Kaplan” <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fanya_Kaplan>]

But in recent years the actual role of Kaplan in assassination has been questioned. In particular, it is suggested that she was on secondary payroles and after the arrest she took the guilt upon herself.

But the “Kaplan attempt” gave the Bolsheviks the excuse they wanted to launch massive, overwhelming state terror. Five hundred hostages were shot in reprisal in Petrograd alone by order of Zinoviev, the head of the local soviet. On September 5, the commissars officially legalized the Red Terror.

Then, at the Party Conference in April of 1922, Lenin suggested that a new post of General Secretary should be created. Lenin’s choice for the post was Joseph Stalin, who in the past had always loyally supported his policies. Stalin’s main opponents for the future leadership of the party failed to see the importance of this position and actually supported his nomination. They initially saw the post of General Secretary as being no more that “Lenin’s mouthpiece.”

Soon after Stalin’s appointment as General Secretary, Lenin went into hospital to have a bullet removed from his body that had been there since Kaplan’s assassination attempt. It was hoped that this operation would restore his health. This was not to be; soon afterwards, a blood vessel broke in Lenin’s brain. This left him paralyzed all down his right side and for a time he was unable to speak. As “Lenin’s mouthpiece,” Joseph Stalin had suddenly become extremely important.

On January 21, 1924, Lenin died from causes variously described as a heart attack, brain hemorrhage, and even syphilis.

The cult of Lenin became a fusion of political and religious ritual. The Politburo decided to embalm his body and place it in a sarcophagus inside a mausoleum for public viewing. The mausoleum, a cube-like structure of gleaming red granite, was built on Red Square abutting onto the Kremlin wall. Here, the most prominent party, military and government leaders would stand to view parades passing by on the anniversary of the October Revolution, May Day and other special occasions.

Images of Lenin’s stern visage soon appeared everywhere throughout the Soviet Union in stone and metal, on canvas, and in print. Lenin Corners, analogous to the icon corners of Russian Orthodox Church, became a fixture of nearly every Soviet institution, and Lenin’s name graced thousands of collective and state farms, libraries, newspapers, streets and cities. Among the cities was the birthplace of the October Revolution which assumed the name of Leningrad on January 26, 1924.

On 1 January 1990 in the Soviet Union there were more than 653 million copies of Lenin’s writings in 125 languages — perhaps the only area of abundance achieved by Communist effort. [Volkogonov, Lenin, p. xxx]

His comrades immediately began fighting amongst themselves to see who was to become his successor. The struggle to succeed Lenin which commenced even before his death in January 1924 rocked the Communist Party to its foundations and had immense consequences to its — and the Soviet Union’s — future.

The question of Lenin’s will, or, put more precisely, of who would be the second person in the Party and the state, arose while Lenin was still alive. The name that always came after Lenin’s was that of Lev Trotsky. On 24 December 1922 Lenin described Trotsky as “the most capable man in the present Central Committee” and “the outstanding leader of the present Central Committee.” [Volkogonov, Lenin, p. 249]

After the Revolution, Lenin and Trotsky had the relationship of equals, but when Lenin became ill in 1922, his relations with other leaders strengthened at Trotsky’s expense. Trotsky visited him less than Stalin. On the other hand, Trotsky, who talked to Lenin’s physicians, seems to have realized sooner than many that Lenin was not going to be able to return to his full functions as Chairman of the Government. And he was convinced in his heart that Lenin could pass the leader’s baton to no one but him. [Volkogonov, Lenin, p. 256]

Beside Trotsky, Lenin’s closest allies were Lev Kamenev and Grigori Zinoviev. They, and they alone, formed the “leadership nucleus” and had also every reason to expect to inherit the mantle of leadership from Lenin.

The man closest to the “troika” of Trotsky–Zinoviev–Kamenev was Grigori Sokolnikov (Brilliant), who in words of Arkady Vaksberg was “the most outstanding Bolshevik leader after Trotsky,” a member of the Central Committee, and at one time a candidate member of the Politburo. Stalin hated him passionately, and with cause. It was Sokolnikov who in 1926 would demand from the tribune of a Party congress Stalin’s removal as General Secretary. All four men whom Stalin perceived as his rivals in the struggle for power were Jewish. [Arkady Vaksberg, Stalin against the Jews (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), pp. 18-19]

Kamenev once told Trotsky (his brother-in-law) that “It will be enough for you and Zinoviev to appear together on the platform in order to reconquer the whole party.” [Isaac Deutscher, Stalin: A Political Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 308]

Well, it didn’t work out that way. Stalin proved to be a more ruthless and/or shrewd leader in the struggle for power. He managed to play all these Jews off against each other. He outmaneuvered Zinoviev, Kamenev, Trotsky, Sokolnikov, Radek, and all the rest, and eventually came out on top.

It undoubtedly was to his advantage during this power struggle that the Russian people detested the Jews, from centuries of bitter experience with them. (At least some of the popular opposition to the Communists in Russia was fueled by hatred of Jews. There were explicitly anti-Semitic posters showing an ugly Jewish Trotsky.)

Well, it’s important to know that Trotsky was feared even by other Jewish Bolsheviks, who banded against him.

After Lenin’s stroke incapacitated him in 1922, as the most famous Trotskyist historian Isaac Deutscher says, “a triumvirate, composed of Stalin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev, formed itself within the Politburo ... Between them, the three men virtually controlled the whole [Communist] party and, through it, the Government ... Zinoviev was, in addition, the President of the Communist International.” [Deutscher, Stalin, p. 255] This “Troika” as it was known was formed to keep Trotsky from the succession.

Though Zinoviev and Kamenev feared Trotsky as too militant and extreme, they shared his belief in permanent revolution, which Stalin did not. Russia had been in almost continuous turmoil for twenty years and had suffered revolutions and counter-revolutions, war, invasions and a pitiless and drawn-out civil war. There were limits to which the endurance of a people could be stretched. The Russians wanted to bury their dead and resume what they could of normal life. Stalin understood this. Therefore, Stalin unleashed a new weapon, which Trotsky probably had not considered him capable of producing. Stalin set forth a theoretical position of his own from which he could challenge Trotsky and his theory of “permanent worldwide revolution.” In Problems of Leninism, published in 1924, Stalin proclaimed his theory of “socialism in one country” — putting the safety of the Soviet Union’s own economic development first, above any international policy of revolution. Stalin’s advocacy of “socialism in one country” proved a politically effective weapon against Trotsky who seemed by contrast to lack faith in the self-sufficiency of the Soviet Union.

In the middle of the 1920s the division in the Bolshevik Party already looked ominously like those in the Jacobin party. There was the Left opposition led by Trotsky, with ultraradical groups such as the Workers’ Opposition in the background; the Right Opposition, led by Bukharin and Rykov; and the Centre, with Stalin at its head.

“The weaker the trio {the triumvirate which succeeded Lenin: Kamenev, Zinoviev and Stalin} felt in matters of principle, the more they feared me — because they wanted to get rid of me — and the tighter they had to bolt all the screws and nuts in the state and party system. Much later, in 1925, Bukharin said to me, in answer to my criticism of the party oppression: ‘We have no democracy because we are afraid of you’.” [Leon Trotsky, My Life (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1975), p. 508]

During a lull in the intra-party fighting in the spring of 1926, Zinoviev, Kamenev and their supporters in the New Opposition gravitated closer to Trotsky’s supporters and the two groups soon formed an alliance, which also incorporated some smaller opposition groups within the Communist Party. The alliance became known as the United Opposition.

Amidst intrigue and power struggles, by 1927 Kamenev and Zinoviev also “at last threw in their lot with Trotsky.” [Deutscher, Stalin, p. 307] Then, in October 1927, Trotsky and Zinoviev were expelled from the Central Committee. When in November of 1927 the United Opposition tried to organize independent demonstrations commemorating the 10th anniversary of the Bolshevik seizure of power, the demonstrators were dispersed by force and Trotsky and Zinoviev were expelled from the Communist Party on November 12. Their leading supporters, from Kamenev down, were expelled in December 1927 by the 15th Party Congress, which paved the way for mass expulsions of rank and file oppositionists as well as internal exile of opposition leaders in early 1928.

When the 15th Party Congress made Opposition views incompatible with membership in the Communist Party, Zinoviev, Kamenev and their supporters capitulated and renounced their alliance with the Left Opposition. Trotsky and most of his followers, on the other hand, refused to surrender and stayed the course.

In the struggle for power that followed Lenin’s death, Stalin eventually emerged victorious over his rivals, eventually succeeding in putting to death nearly every one of the most prominent early Bolsheviks leaders — including Trotsky, Zinoviev, Radek, and Kamenev. With the passage of time, and particularly after 1928, the Jewish role in the top leadership of the Soviet state and its Communist party diminished markedly. Via the purges of the 1930s, Stalin overthrew Jewish Bolshevism and installed a Russian version. It is frequently argued that Stalin’s rise to power marked the end of the Jewish phase of communism. In support of this, it is pointed out that while such Jews as Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Martynov, Zasulich, Deutsch, Parvus, Axelrod, Radek, Uritsky, Sverdlov, Dan, Lieber, Martov, and others were prominent in the early history of the revolution, these have almost without exception been executed or exiled.

Now, it’s about time to say at least something about Stalin himself. There is no need to describe the impact that Joseph Stalin exercised on Russia. He was, no doubt, among the most enigmatic figures of the twentieth century. However, his influence was by no means innovative. What was later called Stalinism was artificially and intentionally separated from Communism, and even set off against it. First of all, by Trotsky and his followers.

Some authors have suggested that Stalin was himself a Jew. Known facts do not bear this out. There are people actually claiming Josef Stalin was Jewish just because his real name, Dzhugashvili, sounds like “Jew,” in English. But that is nonsense! In the Georgian language “shvili” means son of, as in John-son. But then some also say that “Dzhuga” means Jew. Therefore Dzhugashvili means “son of a Jew” (something like Jewison). No, the actual word for “Jew” in Georgian is “ebraeli” and the more colloquially used “uriya”... Word “dzhuga” means “flock” or “steel” dependent on the originating cultural meaning.

Stalin (or Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili) was born in the mountain village of Gori, situated in the province of Georgia, in 1879. His father, Vissarion Dzhugashvili, was a peasant from the neighboring town of Dido-Lilo — his mother was Katevan (or Ekaterina) Geladze, whose forebears were serfs in the village of Gambareuli. Not too much is known about Stalin’s father. He was for a time a cobbler, and he seems to have worked as a day laborer in a shoe factory in Adelkhanov. He is said to have been a heavy drinker. Stalin’s mother was a devoutly religious woman who took in washing to feed her family, and her life’s ambition was to see her son become a priest. Young Joseph attended the elementary school in Gori — a four year course — and in 1894 he obtained a free scholarship to the Tiflis Theological Seminary which provided free clothing, books, and food in addition to his tuition. Four years later he was expelled, after which he applied himself to revolutionary activity.

Actually, Stalin’s family were not Georgian, as is popularly thought, but they were in fact Georgian-speaking Ossetians. In the Caucasus, that means a great deal. The Ossetians have been in Georgia and the Caucasus for a long time. Numbering approximately a quarter of a million in Stalin’s youth, the Ossetians were a people of Iranian-Japhetic origin, who later mixed with the conquering Scythians, an ancient Persian-related people known for their worship of fire (to many minds, Stalin would come to epitomize the Scythian spirit). Most of the Ossetians made their home in the 15,000-foot-high icefields in the middle of the Great Caucasus, where, according the legend, the Titan Prometheus stole fire from heaven and was chained to a rock by the Olympian gods while vultures tore at his liver. Karl Marx would refer to the central and northern Caucasus, where the Ossetians lived, as the “knees” of the Russian empire. The fire-worshipping tribe, living among the knife-edged massifs where yellow-eyed tigers roamed, called their capital Dzaudzhikau, ages later to be renamed Ordzhonikidze after one of Stalin’s associates. Most Ossetians spoke a dialect called Iron and lived in a district of the same name-poetically fitting for an area where the Iron Age began, and for the region’s most famous son, who chose the name Stalin, meaning Man of Steel. The name Iron is derived from “Iran,” according to Ossetians. The Christianized Ossetians were the only Caucasian people who consistently welcomed Great Russian hegemony, possibly providing a clue to Joseph Dzhugashvili’s (Stalin’s) passionate desire to assimilate? The mature Stalin sometimes thought of himself as an Asiatic and was never able to shake off his thick Georgian accent, but he completely identified with the Russian majority. In this respect he can be likened to the Corsican Napoleon, who came to personify France, or to Hitler, the Austrian Führer of Germany.

The Gulag is commonly associated with the name of Stalin, but the true father of the Bolshevik mass terror was, no doubt, Trotsky. He did not merely inspire revolutionary terror, he was the one to make it into a state institution. The vast majority of those people who are now said to have been made the victims during the period of the “Stalinist repressions” were in fact victimized actually in the earlier period, that is to say in the first decade after the revolution and civil war.

Up until 1937–1938, the Soviet Union was ruled by an apparatus in which Zionists had a tremendous preponderance. It was only after 1938 that the real leadership of the country passed to Stalin and his government apparatus. Everything that had been done in the provinces before then was done also in Stalin’s name, of course. This applies particularly to the introduction of collective farming. The excessive steps taken in dispossessing the better-off Russian farmers, and the massive repressions against the peasants, were the work of the pro-Zionist state machinery, which was in fact glad of the opportunity to work once again on the genetic stock of the Russian people and cause it to deteriorate. And, again, let’s not forget individuals as Kaganovich.

These were the operations of the Soviet system which, by reason of its nature, often produced very, very negative results. Apart from people who were really pro-Zionist, a tremendous number of people were also repressed who were innocent. Certain factors contributed to this. Firstly, the instructions were not clear: who was the enemy? Secondly, both the central and the local authorities wished to achieve distinction. Overfulfilling the government’s plans was so fashionable in the Soviet Union, and so too was fulfilling them at any price.

And Zionism was conducting its direct operations here. The Zionists understood Stalin’s objective and decided, when being removed from their positions of influence, to harm Russia as much as possible. Every true Zionist who had been arrested gave the names of many people, mostly innocent. The Zionists alleged that these people had been involved in organizing and carrying out the counter-revolutionary activities, espionage, and other operations, which were being conducted by the Zionists themselves. These people, suffering the physical effects of interrogation — a method of operation introduced by the Zionists — took the guilt upon themselves, in this way signing their own death warrants.

Now, why did the Zionists allow Stalin in, and why did they not eliminate him at the very outset or at a later date? Well, because he deceived them! They thought he was one of theirs. At the beginning of his career as Secretary General of the Party, Stalin surrounded himself with Zionists. As I just said, there was triumvirate of Stalin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev. Until about 1937 it was not obvious at all that Stalin’s chief goal was to liquidate Zionist power in the Soviet Union. Even after 1937, Stalin gave the impression of having no claims upon the Zionists: Lazar Kaganovich, whose very name made him a convenient cover for Stalin against any accusations of anti-Semitism, was one of Stalin’s closest aides and outlived him by many years.

In 1994, Jewish author Arkady Vaksberg (who himself, as far as I know, still lives in Russia) wrote a book entitled Stalin against the Jews. Its fundamental thesis is that Stalin was a fanatical anti-Semite. (Louis Rapoport’s book Stalin’s War Against the Jews reflects the same theme.)

Yes, as early as 1902, Stalin, for example, stressed the Jewishness of the Mensheviks in very abusive words, claiming that all Jews were cowards. [Mikhail Agursky, The Third Rome: National Bolshevism in the USSR (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1987), p. 110] While before the revolution it was emotional factors that pressed on Stalin, after the revolution more prosaic and concrete factors came into play. The vicious power struggle was organically colored in ethnic hues. As Vaksberg says, “Every (not almost every, but literally every) one of Stalin’s serious rivals in that struggle was Jewish.” [Vaksberg, Stalin against the Jews, p. 18]

On the third anniversary of the October Revolution there was published a colorful album, which opened with a photomontage of a gallery of the founders of the revolution — Lenin surrounded by his closest comrades. To the right of Lenin is Zinoviev, to the left, Trotsky. There are sixty-one men in the photographs, but Stalin is not among them. We can imagine his frustration and anger. And of the pictured Bolsheviks, more than a third, twenty-two, are Jews. And the picture, moreover, does not include Kaganovich, Pyatnitsky, Goloshchekin, and many others who were part of the ruling circle, and whose presence on that album page would have raised the percentage of Jews even higher. [Vaksberg, Stalin against the Jews, p. 20]

“I learned quite suddenly,” recalled his former secretary, Boris Bazhanov, “that Stalin was an anti-Semite.” [Vaksberg, Stalin against the Jews, p. 27] “He never liked Jews,” Stalin’s daughter Svetlana would write in her memoirs, “though he wasn’t as blatant about expressing his hatred for them in those days [the mid1930s] as he was after the war.” [Svetlana Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters to a Friend (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), p. 159.] As Khrushchev put it: “Suddenly after the war, Stalin was seized by a fit of anti-Semitism.” [Louis Rapoport, Stalin’s War against the Jews, p. 77] At Yalta in 1945 Stalin told U.S. President Roosevelt that Jews were “profiteers and parasites.” [Rapoport, Stalin’s War against the Jews, p. 77]

Stalin, no doubt, disliked Jews, but he never acted simply to gratify his likes and dislikes. Could someone as cunning as Stalin fail to understand that his official anti-Semitism would create a wave of hostility against the USSR in the West, and above all in the United States?

The fact that Stalin was surrounded (at least till 1937–1938) by Jews everywhere in positions of high power is described by Vaksberg as “camouflage” for the Soviet leader’s hatred of Jews. [Vaksberg, Stalin against the Jews, p. 27] This is exactly what I said just a couple of minutes ago. Vaksberg describes Stalin as a singularly rabid, irrational Jew-hater even while stating that “the people who surrounded Stalin and who had rendered him service in the twenties and thirties were mostly Jews” [Vaksberg, Stalin against the Jews, p. 35] and conceding that Jews especially close to Stalin like Emelyan Yaroslavsky (Mines Gubelman), Moisey Gubelman, Lev Mekhlis (“Stalin’s right hand man”), [Vaksberg, Stalin against the Jews, p. 23] Lazar Kaganovich and Isaac Mintz all survived Stalin’s declared “anti-Zionist” purges.

Arkady Vaksberg wanders: “Why did Stalin, as an anti-Semite have two Jewish secretaries — Lev Mekhlis and Grigori Kanner?” [Vaksberg, Stalin against the Jews, p. 27] As historian Donald Rayfield says, “Stalin’s least-known but most vicious scorpion was Lev Mekhlis who helped Rozalia Zemliachka-Zalkind murder captured White officers in the Crimea.” [Donald Rayfield, Stalin and His Hangmen: An Authoritative Portrait of a Tyrant and Those Who Served Him (New York: Viking, 2004), p. 384] “The Commissar of State Control then was the vile and vicious Lev Mekhlis,” describes him Arkady Vaksberg. [Vaksberg, Stalin against the Jews, p. 129] “Lev Mekhlis,” notes Louis Rapoport, “would become Stalin’s secretary and one of the most despised men in Soviet history. [Rapoport, Stalin’s War against the Jews, p. 30]

Well, Lev Zakharovich Mekhlis was the son of a Jewish office worker in Odessa. He was an impassioned Bolshevik who had imprisoned his own father and testified against him before a secret police tribunal. He became the main perpetrator of the purges which wiped out the Soviet officer corps. [Adam B. Ulam, Stalin: The Man and His Era (Beacon Press, 1987), p. 447.] He was instrumental in the execution of 15,000 Red Army officers. [Rapoport, Stalin’s War against the Jews, p. 200]

Why too, we might add in turning Vaksberg’s facts to different theses, whenever Stalin went on a vacation, did Lazar Kaganovich, a Jew, take over running the government? [Vaksberg, Stalin against the Jews, p. 51] And why, we might add, if Stalin was so all-encompassingly hateful of Jews, did he entrust his life to a Jewish bodyguard, Matyas Rakoszy? [Vaksberg, Stalin against the Jews,

p. 40] (Another Jewish bodyguard, son of a rabbi, and “protégé of Nikita Khruschev,” was Alexander Contract, who started out in the NKVD — later the KGB. Contract even saved the life of future Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin). [Thomas O’Dwyer, “The Rabbi’s Son at Stalin’s Side,” The Jerusalem Post, July 6, 1998.]

Moreover, all prominent non-Jewish Communist Party officials (and close associates of Stalin’s social circle), Kalinin, Bukharin, Molotov, Voroshilov, Andreyev, Poskrebyshev, and Rykov, all had Jewish wives. Stalin’s own daughter Svetlana had an affair with Jewish screenwriter Alexei Kapler; she later married Grigory Morozov (Moroz), also Jewish. [Vaksberg, Stalin against the Jews, p. 138; Rapoport, Stalin’s War against the Jews, p. 208] Stalin’s first son Yakov had Jewish wife. The fact that Stalin reportedly did not approve is routinely explained by Jewish scholars as anti-Semitism.

The purging of Zionists in the Party and State apparatus began as early as 1929. At first secret methods, rather than open measures such as arrest and trial, were employed. From that time onwards, Stalin found himself in a situation where he might, albeit at a later stage, be declared a political criminal. The methods by which he worked were, as I have said, borrowed from his Zionist opponents: when in Rome, do as the Romans do. Those methods went far beyond the limits of what is done in civilized countries. But he deliberately practised such methods. He saw no possibility of liquidating Zionism in Russia by any other means, and this was later to cost him the loss of his reputation. Secret methods of eliminating one’s opponents were too costly, but from 1931 onwards they became considerably less expensive: Zionists, pro-Zionists, and those who were caught in the trap of Zionism, began to be proclaimed as members of the opposition and as counterrevolutionaries. Work began on arresting them, giving them a trial for the sake of appearances, and liquidating them.

The fact that many Jews died during these purges is beyond question. Among them, to give just few examples, were such really innocent people as famous poet Osip Mandelshtam and theatrical director Vsevolod Meyerkhold. Now, as always in these lectures let’s consult our very Jewish professor Yuri Slezkine from Berkeley and see what he has to say, in his recent book The Jewish Century:

Members of the political elite suffered disproportionately during the Great Terror. Because Jews were disproportionately represented within the political elite, they were prominent among the victims. [Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 272]

As one can judge from the national composition of the oppositionists arrested after the 15th Party Congress, the majority of them were indeed Jews, although we are speaking only about the strongest activists. In the Ural political prison at the beginning of the 1930s, 43 percent of the Trotskyites were Jews. [Agursky, The Third Rome, p. 335] Again from Slezkine:

Most Soviet Jews were not directly affected by the Great Terror, and of those who were, most suffered as members of the political elite. [Slezkine, The Jewish Century, p. 275]

The Jews, who were not numerous among nonelite victims, were underrepresented in the Great Terror as a whole. In 1937-38, about 1 percent of all Soviet Jews were arrested for political crimes, as compared to 16 percent of all Poles and 30 percent of all Latvians. By early 1939, the proportion of Jews in the Gulag was about 15.7 percent lower than their share of the total Soviet population. The reason for this was the fact that the Jews were not targeted as an ethnic group. None of those arrested during the Great Terror of 1937-38 was arrested as a Jew. The secret police did put together several Jewish-specific cases, but they were all politically (not ethnically) defined. [Slezkine, The Jewish Century, p. 273]

Indeed, Jews were the only large Soviet nationality ... that was not targeted for a purge during the Great Terror. [Slezkine, The Jewish Century, p. 274]

In August 1936, the first Moscow show trial of the so-called “Trotskyite-Zinovievite Terrorist Center” was staged in front of an international audience. During the trial, Zinoviev, Kamenev and 14 other accused, most of them prominent Old Bolsheviks, confessed to having plotted with Trotsky to kill Stalin and other members of the Soviet leadership. The court found everybody guilty and sentenced the defendants to death, Trotsky in absentia. The second show trial of Karl Radek, Grigory Sokolnikov, Yuri Pyatakov and 14 others took place in January 1937, with even more alleged conspiracies and crimes linked to Trotsky.

There is a fairly well substantiated story about the final minutes of Lenin’s and Trotsky’s closest comrades, who formed the leading circle of the revolution.

After the assassination of Leningrad Party chief, Sergei Kirov, on 1 December 1934, both Zinoviev and Kamenev were arrested. Kamenev tried to dissociate himself from Zinoviev, hoping in this way to mitigate his lot. Zinoviev meanwhile tearfully begged for mercy in letters to Stalin.

At their trial in August 1936, the “Bolshevik twins” had agreed to confess to all the fantastic charges, in exchange for Stalin’s promise to spare their lives.

In his letters to Stalin from prison, Zinoviev sank to the lowest depths of humiliation: “I am at the point where I sit for long periods and stare at your portrait in the newspapers and those of other members of the Politburo thinking: my dear ones, look into my heart and surely you will see that I’m no longer your enemy, that I am yours, body and soul...” He signed his letters, “With all my soul, I am now yours, G. Zinoviev.”

Scorpion was eating scorpion, the system was remorselessly consuming its creators...

According to accounts of Zinoviev’s execution, he had collapsed in fear and hysteria, screeching at the top of his high-pitched voice as he was dragged into a killing cell in the Lubyanka prison, where an NKVD lieutenant shot him in the head. [Rapoport, Stalin’s War against the Jews, p. 50] Zinoviev literally licked the boots of his executioners minutes before his death. Then he raised his hands to the heavens, and shouted, “Shema Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Ehad!” (“Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One!”) This is the first line of “Shema” (from Devarim–Deuteronomy 6:4), a central affirmation of faith in Judaism; among Orthodox Jews, it is traditionally the final utterance of a person before death. [Vaksberg, Stalin against the Jews, p. 42]

Well, this was the same Apfelbaum-Zinoviev who, as I already quoted, said:

“We will make our hearts cruel, hard and immovable, so that no mercy will enter them, and so that they will not quiver at the sight of a sea of enemy blood. We will let loose the floodgates of that sea. Without mercy, without sparing, we will kill our enemies in scores of hundreds. Let them be thousands; let them drown themselves in their own blood! Let there be floods of blood of the bourgeois — more blood! As much as possible!”

He was the one who said: “The bourgeoisie can kill some individuals, but we can murder whole classes of people.” He was the one whose pronouncement of 17 September 1918 sounds almost unbelievable in its monstrosity: “From the population of a hundred million in Soviet Russia, we must win over ninety million to our side. We have nothing to say to the others. They have to be exterminated.”

Now Stalin took care of him and his ilk.

But how about Trotsky himself? Well, as Donald Rayfield put it, “Trotsky’s arrogance undid him.” [Rayfield, Stalin and His Hangmen, p. 134]

Trotsky first was exiled to Alma Ata on January 31, 1928. Soon, in February 1929, he was expelled from the Soviet Union. His first station in exile was the Turkish island of Prinkipo off the Istanbul coast, where he stayed four years. There were many former White Army officers in Istanbul, which put Trotsky’s life in danger, but a number of Trotsky’s European supporters volunteered to serve as bodyguards and assured his safety. In 1933 Trotsky was offered asylum in France. But he was not even allowed to visit Paris. In 1935 it was implied to him that he was no longer welcome in France. After weighing alternatives, he moved to Norway, where he got permission to enter the country. After two years, allegedly under influence from the Soviet Union, he was put under house arrest. After consultations with Norwegian officials, his transfer to Mexico on a freighter was arranged.

Trotsky and a handful of close collaborators arrived in Mexico in January 1937. The administration of General Lázaro Cárdenas was the only government in the world that would grant Trotsky asylum. Trotsky went to live in a suburb of Mexico City, in a house lent by his friend and political supporter, Diego Rivera, a well-known Mexican painter. Trotsky was allowed to come to Mexico, after Diego Rivera had used his influence to make this possible. But after sexual indiscretions with his host’s wife Frida (also famous artist) Trotsky eventually quarreled with Rivera and in 1939 moved into his own residence in Coyoacán, a neighborhood in Mexico City.

Stalin would bitterly regret having allowed Trotsky to leave the Soviet Union in 1929, and he set the NKVD — successor of the Cheka and OGPU — the task of eliminating his sworn enemy almost as soon as Trotsky was outside Soviet jurisdiction. Stalin’s assassination team pursued Trotsky, but for many years failed to hit the fatal mark.

In the middle of the night on 24 May, 1940, came the first direct assault on Trotsky’s life. A group of armed raiders forced their way into Trotsky’s house, raked the bedrooms with machine-gun fire, and set off incendiaries evidently intended to destroy Trotsky’s archives and cause the maximum possible damage. Trotsky narrowly escaped death by lying on the floor beneath the bed. This assassination attempt was carried out under the leadership Mexican painter David Alfaro Siqueiros.

Then, that same year, on August 20th, another assassination succeeded. Ramon Mercader had become one of Trotsky’s trusted helpers, and one night he drove an ice axe into Trotsky’s head. Mexican authorities sentenced Mercader to 20 years in prison. The Soviet Union awarded him with the title of Hero of the Soviet Union and awarded Mercader’s mother the Order of Lenin.

The story of Trotsky’s murder is too well known to bear repeating it now in greater detail. What is important for us is the fact that the leaders in this successful operation were both Jews, both major figures in the NKVD (when the NKVD introduced the rank of general, they both got it) — Naum Eitingon and Grigory Rabinovich, who received the highest decorations of the USSR for achieving the most important of Stalin’s aims. [Vaksberg, Stalin against the Jews, pp. 96-97]

At Stalin’s behest, Trotsky’s image was photographically removed from certain significant group pictures that documented the early history of communist Russia. Other rivals and traitors, perceived or real, likewise were literally blotted out of Russian history books after being blotted bodily from the face of the earth. In effect, they “died twice.”

The situation in the Soviet Union changed considerably after the purges of 1937 and 1938. But even then Stalin was unable to state openly that those whom he opposed were of course not “counter-revolutionaries”, “spies”, “saboteurs”, “conspirators”, or the like, but were rather Zionists pursuing their methods and objectives, and were quite simply enemies of the Russian people. He was still compelled to resort to false accusations in order to rid the peoples of Russia of a very great danger and save them from their most vicious enemies.

He could not announce his struggle against the Zionists, because he would have been proclaimed (internationally) anti-Semite, and so on. On the other hand, Stalin’s domestic authority would have been mightily undermined if he had announced publicly that he had been compelled to resort to deceit. He also hoped that the remaining Jewish communists had understood everything and would continue to serve the country and not work towards the goals of Zion. But it seems to me that this was a mistake. (Even such a furious battler against Zionism as Stalin did not, even to the very end, understand the Zionists’ nature: Zionism is indestructible as long as there are Zionists.)

It is also not impossible that Stalin wished to announce the whole truth to the people immediately after completely liquidating Zionism in the Soviet Union. I don’t know. He managed to do neither the one nor the other, but nevertheless undoubtedly dealt Zionism in Russia a most powerful blow.

As even Jewish writer Mikhail Agursky says, the Russian population praised Stalin for “moving the party from the Jewish tracks.” [Agursky, The Third Rome, p. 324] A Jewish joke compared Stalin and Moses: Moses took the Jews out of Egypt, and Stalin took them out of the Central Party Committee. And so on. A leading Jewish politician, Boris Brutskus, expelled from Russia in 1922, wrote in 1926: “Russian life has plunged stormily into a river-bed that has nothing to do with the ways outlined in Marx’s teachings. From this moment, the star of Jewish Bolsheviks has been setting.” Brutskus, like Gorky and others, put the responsibility for the anti-Semitism on the Jewish Bolsheviks themselves. “Jewish Bolsheviks,” he said, “have abundantly sown the most malicious seeds of anti-Semitism.” [Quoted in Agursky, The Third Rome, p. 324] The most extreme Zionist of the time, Vladimir Jabotinsky, called the new political development in the Soviet leadership a mobilization of Russian nationalism. “Many people,” he said, “have forecast for a long time that the moment would come when Bolshevism ... will start its liberation from its — in the broad sense of this word — Jewish section.” [Quoted in Agursky, The Third Rome, p. 324]

Stalin took up the cause of “socialism in one country” not simply as a cudgel to oppose the Jewish revolutionaries who followed Trotsky’s internationalist preachings, but because he was in essence, yes, a Russian nationalist. [Rapoport, Stalin’s War against the Jews, pp. 38-39] “When Stalin destroyed the so-called Left Opposition in the 1920s, he let it be known that the opposition was led by Jews, and that the struggle was between Russian socialism and aliens,” says Louis Rapoport. [Rapoport, Stalin’s War against the Jews, p. 38] The political defeat of that Jewish Zionist “section” was widely regarded as a Russian victory par excellence. A Russian professor who left Russia in 1927 explained: “Do you know what Stalin’s victory over the opposition means? This is the victory of the majority of the Russian population over international communism — in the face of the Comintern. Without the support of this majority Stalin would never have won.” [Quoted in Agursky, The Third Rome, pp. 335-336]

The elimination of Jews from the Soviet communist leadership was actually widely welcomed abroad. As Jewish scholar Mikhail Agursky wrote, “The Soviet system was widely regarded as essentially Jewish dominated, and the majority of Western politicians regarded Stalin’s victory as a very positive Soviet isolationist development.” [Agursky, The Third Rome, p. 339] But what’s most interesting is that Stalin’s victory was especially welcomed by the so-called “left-wing” Nazis in Germany. It was said, for example, that Stalin, that “silent and active Russian, moved the center of gravity from the idea of internationalism to the Russian national idea. ... This does not mean that Stalin is not a revolutionary, but he is a Russian revolutionary and not an international one.” Ernst Reventlow, Gregor Strasser, Otto Strasser, Joseph Goebbels, and others in Germany were jubilant at this view. Otto Strasser even came to the conclusion that Stalin’s real objective was to finish the revolution and liquidate communism. [Agursky, The Third Rome, pp. 339-340]

However, Hitler did not think so. He was persuaded that the Jews still constituted the backbone of Soviet state power and that the Russians could not run their country without them. For him, the end of Jewish domination would mean the end of the Russian state. [Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (Boston, 1943), p. 655.] Hitler paid dearly for this view. The differences in principle between Hitler’s national-socialism and Stalin’s socialism can be reduced to Hitler’s declaration: “My socialism is not the class struggle, but order.” However, Stalin’s socialism converged with Hitler’s in that it too became national. [Rayfield, Stalin and His Hangmen, p. 253]

Stalin cautiously supported Lenin while repeatedly expressing his strictly nationalistic view of the Russian revolution and so he was condemned by the Trotskyists. Stalin had made communism too nationalistic — a “national communism,” in fact. Stalinist “national communism” of this kind is often called National Bolshevism as well. By the way, later, wartime Russian propaganda never referred to the Nazis as “national socialists”. The communists testifying at the International Military Tribunal always referred to the Nazis and the Wehrmacht as Hitlerians or fascists.

But about the war we are going to talk next time.

Let’s now move to the concluding part of our lecture

Trotsky and his followers originally hoped for the triumph of the communism on a global scale. Their views were defined by a notion of permanent revolution that would transcend nations and constantly expand to envelop the globe. Although Trotsky himself had a rather fateful encounter with an ice pick in 1940, Trotskyists today continue his fight. These days however many Trotskyists prefer to call themselves “neoconservatives.”

The ideas now known as “neoconservative” began boiling in the minds of a group of Jewish American Trotskyists in the 1930s and 1940s. This group “morphed into anti-communist liberalism between the 1950s and 1970s,” writes author and journalist Michael Lind in the London-based New Statesman magazine, “and finally into a kind of militaristic and imperial right” that we see today. [Michael Lind, “How Neoconservatives Conquered Washington – and Launched a War,” April 10, 2003, <http://www.antiwar.com/orig/lind1.html>] They are now the strategists who pushed for war in Iraq.

In one of the first in-depth studies written about neoconservatism in the 1970s, The Neoconservatives: The Men Who Are Changing America’s Politics (1978), Peter Steinfels observed that it is impossible to understand the neoconservatives without understanding their history. Leon Hadar, a former UN bureau chief for the Jerusalem Post, laid out the now widely accepted view in an article in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs:

Among the major figures in the [neoconservative] movement were former Trotskyites who studied in the ’30s and ’40s at the then “poor man’s Harvard,” the City College of New York, a center for socialist activism. They included Irving Kristol, who in the 1950s launched an anti-Soviet CIA front, the International Congress for Cultural Freedom; Norman Podhoretz, the editor of the American Jewish Committee’s monthly magazine Commentary, which he turned into a major neoconservative outlet; Podhoretz’s wife, Midge Decter, the chairperson of the now-defunct Committee on the Free World; sociologists Nathan Glazer and Daniel Bell; and Democratic Party pamphleteer Ben Wattenberg. [Leon Hadar, “The ‘Neocons’: From the Cold War to the ‘Global Intifada’,” WRMEA, April 1991, <http://www.washington-report.org/backissues/0491/9104027.htm>.]

And, as historian Alan Wald detailed in his probably the most authoritative work on the impact of Trotskyism on the so-called “New York Intellectuals,” The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930’s to the 1980’s (1987), many of the others who also today belong to neoconservatives also did indeed pass through the different shades of Trotskyism available in the 1930s and 1940s. From its different generations, one can list: Elliot Cohen, Sidney Hook, Herbert Solow, Meyer Schapiro, Irving Howe, Saul Bellow, Harold Rosenberg, and Clement Greenberg. All are Jewish.

This is why among neocons today there is, as Michael Lind put it, “a distinct Trotskyist political culture, which shows its residual influence even on individuals who renounced Trotskyism or who were never Trotskyists but inherited this political culture from their parents or older mentors.” [Michael Lind, “I Was Smeared,” June 30, 2003, <http://hnn.us/articles/printfriendly/1530.html>]

The Trotskyist pedigree of neoconservatism is no secret; the original neocon, founder of this political movement, Irving Kristol (who is daddy to Bill Kristol of Weekly Standard and also Foundation of New American Century), acknowledged it with relish. In 1995, this ober-neocon candidly stated: “I regard myself to have been a young Trostkyite and I have not a single bitter memory.” [Quoted in Daniel McCarthy, “Springtime for Trotsky,” November 6, 2001,

<http://www.lewrockwell.com/dmccarthy/dmccarthy23.html>]

You can see in that statement his willingness to identify with Trotsky. Irving Kristol, a former Trotskyist and later one of the few original founders of neoconservative movement, describes proudly his early views in his Memoirs of a Trotskyist. As a student in the 1930s and early 1940s, Kristol was a proud member of the Young People’s Socialist League, a radical Trotskyist group that hoped for a permanent revolution that would envelop the globe. “Joining a radical movement when one is young is very much like falling in love when one is young,” Irving Kristol wrote. “The girl may turn out to be rotten, but the experience of love is so valuable, it can never be entirely undone by the ultimate disenchantment.” [Irving Kristol, Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea (New York: The Free Press, 1995), p. 470. Also available on the Internet at <http://www.pbs.org/arguing/nyintellectuals_krystol_2.html>]

In his autobiographical Reflections of a Neoconservative, he describes his early views as a “romantic passion” in which society was guided by an “intellectual and moral elite.” “It would never have occurred to us to denounce anything as ‘elitist’,” Irving Kristol wrote, describing his Trotskyist upbringing. “The elite was us — the ‘happy few’ who had been chosen by History to guide our fellow creatures toward a secular redemption.” [Kristol, Neoconservatism, p. 471.]

That this is the organizational and intellectual pre-history of the neoconservatives is pretty much beyond dispute. “The origins of their ideology on the left are apparent,” says Michael Lind. “The fact that most of the younger neocons were never on the left is irrelevant; they are the intellectual (and, in the case of William Kristol and John Podhoretz, the literal) heirs of older ex-leftists. ... The concept of the ‘global democratic revolution’ has its origins in the Trotskyist Fourth International’s vision of permanent revolution.” [Michael Lind, “A Tragedy of Errors,” The Nation, February 23, 2004, <http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040223&s=lind>]

All twentieth century Jewish intellectual and political movements stem from the deep involvement of Jews with the left. However, beginning in the late 1920s, when the followers of Leon Trotsky broke off from the mainstream communist movement, the Jewish left has not been unified.

By all accounts the major figure linking Trotsky and the neoconservative movement is Max Shachtman, a Jew born in Poland in 1904 but brought to the

U.S. as an infant. If we want to discover the Marxist and especially Trotskyist antecedents of neoconservatism, then we certainly must investigate the career of Max Shachtman, one of the founders of American Trotskyism whose personal and political odyssey illustrates how the ideology and leadership of today’s War Party evolved, not from the Right, but from the far Left.

Like other leftists during the 1920s, Shachtman was enthusiastic about the Soviet Union, writing in 1923 that it was “a brilliant red light in the darkness of capitalist gloom.” [Quoted in Peter Drucker, Max Shachtman and His Left: A Socialist’s Odyssey through the “American Century” (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1994), p. 25.]

To a much greater extent than the U.S. Communist Party, which was much larger and was committed to following the Soviet line, the Trotskyists survived as a small group centered around charismatic leaders like Shachtman, who paid homage to the famous Trotsky, who lurked in the background as an exile from the USSR living in Mexico. In the Jewish milieu of the movement, Shachtman was much admired as a speaker because of his ability in debate and in polemics. Max Shachtman was a tremendously charismatic figure, a pyrotechnic speaker. He became the quintessential rabbinical guru — the leader of a close, psychologically intense group: “He would hug them and kiss [his followers]. He would pinch both their cheeks, hard, in a habit that some felt blended sadism and affection.” The Trotskyist movement had a Jewish milieu as Shachtman attracted young Jewish disciples — the familiar rabbi/disciple model of Jewish intellectual movements: “Youngsters around Shachtman made little effort to hide their New York background or intellectual skills and tastes. Years later they could still hear Shachtman’s voice in one another’s speeches.” [Drucker, Max Shachtman and His Left, p. 43]

Then Max Shachtman became a Cold Warrior and social democrat in the late 1940s, while his erstwhile Trotskyist allies in the Fourth International were bent on continuing their isolation in separate factions on the left. By the 1950s he stopped calling himself a Trotskyist. [Drucker, Max Shachtman and His Left, p. 219] In the 1960s “he suggested more openly than ever before that U.S. power could be used to promote democracy in the third world” — a view that aligns him with later neoconservatives. [Drucker, Max Shachtman and His Left, p. 179]

In his book The Neoconservative Mind (1993) Garry Dorrien argues also for the centrality of James Burnham (who wasn’t Jewish), who in the 1930s was, indeed, a leading intellectual and leader of the American Trotskyists, as an ideological precursor of the neoconservatives. One of Dorrien’s main contentions is that through Burnham and later Irving Kristol, neoconservatism retained the “rhetorical methods” and “chief concepts” of Trotskyism. [Gary Dorrien, The Neoconservative Mind (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), pp. 381, 36.] I did myself quite a bit of research on Burnham, but because of shortage of time now I can’t go into too many details here. So let’s focus better on Irving Kristol and others, who are still alive and dangerous today.

Irving Kristol was a Trotskyist, eventually winding up as a member of the Shachtman group, as were several other prominent the so-called “New York intellectuals” who followed Shachtman on his rightward course — sometimes lagging behind, sometimes skipping ahead — and finally crossing over to the right, in the cold war era, to make up the intellectual core of the War Party today. Kristol joined Shachtman’s Trotskyist Workers’ Party in 1940. He belonged to a small intra-party faction known as the “Shermanites” which was led by future sociologist

Philip Selznick. [Alan M. Wald, The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930’s to the 1980’s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press), p. 350.]

For quite some time I couldn’t understand what there was a difference between “Shermanites” and “Shachtmanites”... Well, “Sherman” was actually the Party name of Philip Selznick (born Philip Shachter). (Jewish, of course.) He became a young Trotskyist around 1937 and joined Shachtman’s Workers Party when it split from the Socialist Workers party in 1940. Selznick immediately organized a faction known as the “Shermanites.” Supporters of the Shermanites included Gertrude Himmelfarb, Seymour Martin Lipset, Marvin Meyers, Martin Diamond, Herbert Garfinkel, Jeremiah Kaplan, and Irving Kristol — all of whom later became well known as neoconservatives.

Moreover, as Srdja Trifkovic, writing in the on-line version of Chronicles magazine, says that second generation of today’s neoconservatives, “including Joshua Muravchik, and Carl Gershman, also came to neoconservatism through the Socialist Party at a time when it was Trotskyite in outlook and politics.” [Srdja Trifkovic, “Neoconservatism, Where Trotsky Meets Stalin And Hitler”, Chronicles Extra, July 23, 2003, <http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/News/Trifkovic/NewsST072303.html>.]

Joshua Muravchik and Carl Gershman played key roles in the Socialist Party and later on in Social Democrats USA, during the 1960’s and 1970’s. Justin Raimondo writes in Anti-War.com, that “it was Shachtman’s particular schismatic brand of Trotskyism, as advocated by the ‘Yipsels’, as Comrade Muravchik and his fellow young commies called themselves, that over time was transmuted into a militant push for global ‘democracy’.” [Justin Raimondo, “Smoking Gun”, Antiwar.com, May 9, 2003, <http://www.antiwar.com/justin/j050903.html>]

Well, intellectual nomads by their very nature, they are as comfortable with one ism as with another. “The transition from whatever it was the neoconservatives formerly purported to believe to whatever it is they now purport to believe was no more wrenching a spiritual odyssey for them than a trip from Pinsk to Prague would be for an Eastern European peddler,” wrote the late Sam Francis is his article about the neocons, “The Real Cabal.” [Chronicles, September 2003, http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/Chronicles/September2003/0903Francis.html]

But even as their worldview changed in response to the failure of communist ideals, their Trotskyist mindset stayed consistent. These ex-Trots simply reinvented themselves. As Justin Raimondo says, “For in spite of their many costume changes

— from the red and pink hues of Trotskyism and Social Democracy, to the gray flannel button down conservatism — there has always been one constant: a passion for war.” [Justin Raimondo, “Iraq – First Stop on the Road to Empire,” October 11, 2002, <http://www.antiwar.com/justin/j101102.html>] Leon Trotsky advocated war and mass murder as do today’s neocons. In the 1920s and 1930s, it was a class war. When Irving Kristol and his band of apostate Trotskyists inveighed against the Stalinists in the 1930s, socialism in one country, they declared, was impossibility: the Revolution had to be exported to Europe, and throughout the world, at gunpoint. In the Soviet Union, they believed, a bureaucratic caste had arisen that was content to rest on Lenin’s (and even more so Trotsky’s) laurels and reap the benefits of their privileged position, instead of doing their duty and going out and spreading the Revolution far and wide.

Growing gradually more disillusioned over the years, and more fixated on hatred of their old enemies, the Stalinists, these embittered Jewish ex-radicals moved into the right wing of the old Socialist Party, and wound up supporting the Cold War and Vietnam War, and all other wars of American Imperialism.

In the context of the Cold War, these refugees from the left continued with their hopes for a global revolution, but instead of the socialist revolution, they joined forces that advocate the triumph of American capitalism, which they all unequivocally equate with democracy. They were united by their aversion to the moral relativism, and their new ideology came to be marked by a Cold War fury, a new permanent global revolution in which America is unquestioningly moral and right. The use of military might to conquer the world in the name of America was the modern manifestation of the Trotskyist ideal. This belief in geopolitical manifest destiny has only grown stronger with time.

“Neoconservatism in the realm of foreign policy is merely Trotskyism-turned-inside-out — a militant internationalism fueled by U.S. taxpayer dollars and backed up by the mightiest military the world has ever seen,” says Justin Raimondo. [Justin Raimondo, “Neocons in Denial,” April 30, 2003, <http://www.antiwar.com/justin/j043003.html>]

As early as 1963 Richard Hofstadter commented on the progression of many ex-Communists from the paranoid left to the paranoid right, clinging all the while to the fundamentally Manichean psychology that underlies both. Four decades later the dominant strain of neoconservatism is declared, as Srdja Trifkovic says, to be a mixture of geopolitical militarism and “inverted socialist internationalism.” [Srdja Trifkovic, “Neoconservatism, Where Trotsky Meets Stalin and Hitler,” Chronicles, July 23, 2003, <http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/News/Trifkovic/NewsST072303.html>]

In his book review of John Ehrman’s The Rise of Neoconservatism, entitled “Trotskyism to Anachronism: The Neoconservative Revolution” that appeared in Foreign Affairs in 1995, John B. Judis, writing specifically on the neoconservative view of foreign policy, maintains that “Neoconservatism was a kind of inverted Trotskyism, which sought to ‘export democracy’, in Muravchik’s words, in the same way that Trotsky originally envisaged exporting socialism”, and that, “[the] neoconservatives who went through the Trotskyist and socialist movements came to see foreign policy as a crusade, the goal of which was first global socialism, then social democracy, and finally democratic capitalism. They never saw foreign policy in terms of national interest or balance of power.” Behind this lay the fact that, “What both the older and younger neoconservatives absorbed from their [Trotskyist] past was an idealistic concept of internationalism.” [John B. Judis, “Trotskyism to Anachronism: The Neoconservative Revolution”, Foreign Affairs, July/August, 1995, <http://www.foreignaffairs.org/19950701fareviewessay5058/john-bjudis/trotskyism-to-anachronism-the-neoconservative-revolution.html>.]

But the neoconservative mindset is apocalyptic, rather than utopian (which characterizes the Trotskyite Left). The replacement of the Soviet threat with the more amorphous “terrorism” now reflects the doomsday revolutionary mentality that can never rest. New missions and new wars will have to be engineered, and pretexts manufactured... [Srdja Trifkovic, “Neoconservatism, Where Trotsky Meets Stalin and Hitler,” Chronicles, July 23, 2003,

<http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/News/Trifkovic/NewsST072303.html>]

One of those neocons, Michael Ledeen, wrote that “creative destruction” is America’s eternal mission, both at home and abroad, and the reason America’s “enemies” hate it: “They cannot feel secure so long as we are there, for our very existence — our existence, not our politics — threatens their legitimacy. They must attack us in order to survive, just as we must destroy them to advance our historic mission.” [Quoted in Srdja Trifkovic, “Neoconservatism, Where Trotsky Meets Stalin and Hitler,” Chronicles, July 23, 2003, <http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/News/Trifkovic/NewsST072303.html>]

From permanent revolution to permanent conquest! Their Trotskyist mindset, shorn of its Soviet roots, morphed easily into a “permanent revolution” on behalf of an American rather than a socialist world order. [Justin Raimondo, “Neocons in Denial,” April 30, 2003, <http://www.antiwar.com/justin/j043003.html>]

It’s just a coincidence that, in year 2003, George W. Bush gave a speech announcing that the U.S. was leading a “global democratic revolution” on the eve of Leon Trotsky’s birthday, but it is one that neatly illustrates the militant revolutionism at the core of American foreign policy.

“While there can be no doubt that [another Leo] Leo Strauss, is the Godfather of the Neocons, it can also be said that Leon Trotsky is their Grandfather.” [B. A. Livingstone, “Neocon Imperialism; or Apocalypse Now?” December 3, 2003, <http://www.chemtrailpatrol.com/cpr_neocon_imperialism_or_apocalypse_now.ht m>]

It’s also worth noting again that the neoconservative preoccupation with exporting “democracy” abroad through war and mercantilism reflects the original split between Trotsky and Stalin. Trotsky argued that there could not be “socialism in one country” but rather that the revolution had to be truly international. Trotsky’s theory is, as I said today many times, called “Permanent Revolution”. This was the central idea in the difference between Stalin and Trotsky in the early stages of the Soviet Union. Whereas Stalin wanted to focus the attention of the people in the re-building of Russia, Trotsky looked to keep the revolution alive taking the fight to the capitalists in the west. Trotsky’s proposed “permanent revolution” was a revolution that must never cease. Trotsky rationalized that the revolution driven by its own inertia would spread and prevail over all its enemies, from the capitalism of the west or what he called, “enemies of the people” to all global enemies. If the revolution failed to be kept alive, it would simply perish.

This is exactly neocons’ philosophy at its core, a core mission to “transform”

U.S. foreign policy to exert a “permanent” global hegemony even if it brings “revolutionary change” just like dear old grand dad, Leon Trotsky. In Wall Street Journal article, neoconservative scholar Michael Ledeen spoke on the justification of a U.S. attack on Iraq. “We are the one truly revolutionary country on Earth,” he declared, and that would be “the reason we will successfully transform the lives ... of millions in the Middle East.” [Michael A. Ledeen, “The War on Terror Won’t End in Baghdad,” Wall Street Journal, September 1, 2002] In another article by Michael Ledeen, entitled “Creative Destruction: How to Wage a Revolutionary War,” the main argument was that it was “time once again to export the democratic revolution” as the best way to defeat the terrorists. [Michael Ledeen, “Creative Destruction”, National Review Online, Sept. 20, 2001, <http://www.nationalreview.com/contributors/ledeen092001.shtml>]

Words cannot be more clear, neocons, like Trotsky, seek a permanent revolution.

Having given up the idea of revolutionary socialism for the more practical project of global “democracy,” this troublesome sect of neoconservatives, not so affectionately known as “neo-cons” (or rather “zio-cons”), is at last having its moment in the sun.

Michael Lind in a much quoted article in the New Statesman from April of 2003 wrote that, “neoconservative defence intellectuals … call their revolutionary ideology ‘Wilsonianism’ (after President Woodrow Wilson), but it is really Trotsky’s theory of the permanent revolution mingled with the far-right Likud strain of Zionism”. [Michael Lind, “The Weird Men Behind George W. Bush’s War”, New Statesman, April 7, 2003, <http://www.newamerica.net/index.cfm?pg=article&pubID=1189>]

Even before Lind, the charge had already been made by famous Paris-based columnist William Pfaff, who had written in the International Herald Tribune in December of 2002 that, “The Bush administration’s determination to deal with its problems through military means ... seems a rightist version of Trotsky’s ‘permanent revolution’, destroying existing institutions and structures in the millenarian expectation that all this violence will come to an end in a better and happier world.” [William Pfaff, “Al Qaeda vs. the White House”, International Herald Tribune, December 28, 2002]

In another article, Pfaff says that neoconservatives, “are influenced by the Trotskyist version of Marxist millenarianism that was the intellectual seedbed of the neoconservative movement.” [William Pfaff, “The Philosophers of Chaos Reap a Whirlwind”, International Herald Tribune, August 23, 2003]

Neoconservatives in the U.S. Defense Department are surreptitiously implementing Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution from the White House. The application of Trotsky’s concept of Permanent Revolution means that the United States is engaging in an “endless war.”

Seymour Hersh, speaking at the American Civil Liberties Union conference on July 7, 2004, gave a pretty good definition of today’s neo-cons: “In a sense I would say Paul Wolfowitz is the greatest Trotskyite of our times. He believes in permanent revolution. And in the Middle East, to begin with, needless to say.” [Quoted in Justin Raimondo, “The Cult of Power: From Leon Trotsky to Paul Wolfowitz, July 14, 2004, <http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=3027>] The real story, as Hersh clearly realizes, is that Paul Wolfowitz is perhaps the greatest Trotskyist not only of our time but of all time. Certainly greater than Trotsky himself, the founder of the Red Army and prophet of world revolution who wound up in some rundown Mexican backwater with an icepick sticking out of his head. Trotsky’s “Fourth International,” stillborn, lived in Stalin’s shadow for all of its brief half-life, but in that time managed to generate a tendency that would eventually culminate in another sort of world revolution — and yet, on second thought, not all that different. [Justin Raimondo, “The Cult of Power: From Leon Trotsky to Paul Wolfowitz, July 14, 2004, <http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=3027>]

Worthy of note is that while ex-Stalinists tended to denounce their Communist roots vehemently, neoconservatives like Kristol and others remain at least wistfully fond of Trotsky. [Gerhard Rempel, "Stalin vs. Trotsky,"

<http://mars.wnec.edu/~grempel/courses/stalin/lectures/StalinTrot.html>] As Jeet Heer has reported in the National Post, citing neocon writer and “ex”-Trotskyist Stephen Schwartz:

To this day, Schwartz speaks of Trotsky affectionately as “the old man” and “L.D.” (initials from Trotsky’s birth name, Lev Davidovich Bronstein). “To a great extent, I still consider myself to be [one of the] disciples of L.D,” he admits, and he observes that in certain Washington circles, the ghost of Trotsky still hovers around. At a party in February celebrating a new book about Iraq, Schwartz exchanged banter with Wolfowitz about Trotsky, the Moscow Trials and Max Shachtman.

“I’ve talked to Wolfowitz about all of this,” Schwartz notes. “We had this discussion about Shachtman. He knows all that stuff, but was never part of it. He’s definitely aware.” The yoking together of Paul Wolfowitz and Leon Trotsky sounds odd, but a long and tortuous history explains the link between the Bolshevik left and the Republican right. [Quoted in Justin Raimondo, “The Cult of Power: From Leon Trotsky to Paul Wolfowitz, July 14, 2004, <http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=3027>]

Stephen Schwartz spent his formative years in a Spanish Trotskyist group.

Trotsky was, no doubt, a successful military leader, and Stephen Schwartz finds support for the idea of pre-emptive war in the old Bolshevik’s writings. “Nobody who is a Trotskyist can really be a pacifist,” Schwartz notes. “Trotskyism is a militaristic disposition. When you are Trotskyist, we don’t refer to him as a great literary critic, we refer to him as the founder of the Red Army.” [“Trotsky’s Ghost Wandering the White House,” National Post, June 07, 2003, <http://www.prisonplanet.com/trotskys_ghost_wandering_the_white_house.htm>]

Stephen Schwartz has claimed there is an anti-Semitic motive behind association of Jewish neocons and Jewish Trotskyists: “The U.S. neofascists who have thrown this accusation around use the term ‘Trotskyist’ the same way they use the term ‘neoconservative’: as a euphemism for ‘Jew’,” he said. [Stephen Schwartz, “Trotskycons?: Pasts and Present, National Review, June 11, 2003, <http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-schwartz061103.asp>]

Somewhere in the bowels of hell Leon Trotsky must be smiling.