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JEWISH? Years After the Bolsheviks Swept to Power, Historians and Contemporaries Still Struggle to Understand the Prominent Role Played by Jews

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JEWISH? Years After the Bolsheviks Swept to Power, Historians and Contemporaries Still Struggle to Understand the Prominent Role Played by Jews COVER V WAS THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION A hundredJEWISH? years after the Bolsheviks swept to power, historians and contemporaries still struggle to understand the prominent role played by Jews • SETH j. FRANTZMAN Yorker about “Lenin and the Russian Spark,” chron- icling 100 years since the journey, entirely discounts n April 9, 1917, a train pulled into a sta- the Jewish aspect of the revolutionaries. tion at Thayngen, a Swiss town on the The reason for this is complicated and tied up with German border. There was a group of notions of antisemitism as well as attempt by the revo- 32 Russians on board and the customs lutionaries themselves to whitewash their ethnic and officials confiscated chocolate and sugar religious differences. Even though Lenin often praised from them. The passengers were exceedingJews the in legal his circle, his wife Nadezhda Krupskaya's own limitO on importation of goods. Then the train shuffled Reminiscences of Lenin (1933) sought to remove these in to Gottmadingen on the German side of the border. touchy subjects in line with Soviet policy. Two German soldiers boarded the passenger cars and A hundred years after the Russian Revolution, there separated the Russians from the rest, moving them to is nostalgia and renewed interest in those figures who second- and third-class berths. led it and the tragedies it unleashed. The 2016 Spanish The “Russians” were an eclectic group, including 10 film The Chosen follows Ramon Mercader, the assassin women and two children. Their names would have of Leon Trotsky, and this year’s British film The Death been known in left-wing and revolutionary circles of of Stalin turns that event into something of a come- the time, so some traveled under aliases. On board dy. In Russia, a new series looks at Leon Trotsky. Pro- was Karl Radek from Lvov in what is now Ukraine, ducer Konstantin Ernst told the Guardian, “I think he and Grigory Zinoviev and his wife, Zlata, also from [Trotsky] combines everything, good and evil, injus- Ukraine. There was the half-Armenian Georgii Safarov tice and bravery. He’s the archetypal 20th-century rev- and his wife as well as Marxist activist Sarah “Olga” olutionary. But people shouldn’t think that if Trotsky on antisemitic websites. Ravich. Grigory Useivich from Ukraine was accompa- had won and not Stalin, things would have been bet- On October 16, the Jewish Museum and Tolerance nied by his wife Elena Kon, the daughter of a Russian ter, because they wouldn’t have been.” Center in Moscow hosted an exhibition called “Free- woman named Khasia Grinberg. The vivacious French The question of “what might have been” is unique- dom for All? The History of One People in the Years feminist Inessa Armand sang and cracked jokes with ly tied to Trotsky because he often symbolized the of Revolution.” With exhibitions and first-person Radek, Ravich and Safarov. Eventually their shouting anti-Stalinist, the wild revolutionary with global im- accounts, it focused on Jewish luminaries of the era, angered the leader of the group, who poked his head pulses and intellectual imagination, as opposed to the such as Trotsky, Julius Martov, Marc Chagall, Vera In- into their berth and scolded them. The leader was doer and statist Stalin with his murderous purges. Part her, Simon Dubnov and Vasily Shulgin. Vladimir Lenin, and he was taking his small group by of that motif is tied up in Trotsky's Jewishness and the Dubnov, born in 1860 in what is now Belarus, was sealed train for a weeklong journey that would end at larger number of Jewish revolutionaries, activists and an enthusiastic Jewish activist. A professor of Jewish Finland Station in St. Petersburg. Half a year later Le- followers who were attracted to Communism in the history in St. Petersburg (then called Petrograd), he nin and some of his cohorts would be running a new late 19th century. supported Jewish self-defense units and literature and state, the Russian Soviet Republic. The role of Jews in the Russian Revolution, and by thought the revolution would bring equality. Howev- Some observers saw Lenin and his band as a motley extension Communism writ large, has always been er, he left in dismay in 1922, eventually settling Riga, group of Jewish revolutionaries. Alexander Guchkov, a sensitive subject because antisemitic voices often Latvia. He was murdered by the Nazis in 1941. Before the Russian minister of war in the Russian Provisional painted Soviet Communism as a Jewish plot, or “Jew- his death he reflected on Jews like Trotsky who joined Government after Tsar Nicholas II abdicated in March ish Bolshevism.” When Alexander Solzhenitsyn be- the Revolution. 1917, told the British military attache General Alfred gan work on a book called 200 Years Together, he was “They appear under Russian pseudonyms because Knox that “the extreme element consists of Jews and criticized for what touching this taboo issue. His own they are ashamed of their Jewish origins. It would be imbeciles.” Lenin’s train had included 19 members comments to the press didn’t help the matter, claim- better to say that their Jewish names are pseudonyms; of his Bolshevik party, several of his allies among the ing two-thirds of the Cheka (secret police) in Ukraine they are not rooted in our people.” Mensheviks and six Jewish members of the Jewish La- were Jewish. Winston Churchill agreed. In a piece in the Illustrat- bor Bund. Almost half the passengers on the train were “I will always differentiate between layers of Jews. ed Sunday Herald in 1920, he broadly stereotyped Jews Jewish. One layer rushed headfirst to the revolution. Another, as either “international” communists, loyal national- Yet history has largely forgotten them. Catherine to the contrary, was trying to stand back. The Jewish ists or Zionists. He called it the “struggle for the soul Merridale’s recent Lenin on the Train doesn’t delve into subject for a long time was considered prohibited.” of the Jewish people” and claimed the Jewish role in the preponderance of Jews. A recent article in The New Unsurprisingly, his book has been posted in PDF form the Russian Revolution “probably outweighs [the role] Tob. Hbhhh OHH1U/IET 3e«» OT H6HMCTM. A BOLSHEVIK posterfrom 1920 shows Lenin sweeping away monarchs, clergy and capitalists. The Russian translates as 'Lenin cleans the dirt from the Earth,' {Wikimedia Commons) FLAGS FLUTTER in front of a monument to Vladimir Lenin during a rally held by Russian Communist Party supporters to mark the October Revolution's centenary in St. Petersburg, last week. (Anton Vaganov/Reuters) of all others. With the notable exception of Lenin, the HOW DID it all go so wrong? To look for some answers, ery sphere of Russian life while, in time, much of the majority of the leading figures are Jews.” YIVO Institute for Jewish Research held a conference singular richness of Jewish cultural life in Russia was Churchill claimed that the driving power came from on Jews in and after the Russian Revolution earlier this flattened, eventually obliterated.” Jewish leaders, who eclipsed their counterparts. He month in New York City. In the introduction to the The roughly three million Jews of the Soviet Union named names: Maxim Litvinoff, Trotsky, Grigory Zi- conference they note the paradoxical role of Jews and at the time of the revolution constituted the largest noviev, Radek, Leonid Krassin. He called this tendency their fate during the revolution. Jewish community in the world, but they were only “astonishing” and accused Jews of playing “the prom- around 2% of the USSR's population. They were con- inent, if not indeed the principal part in the system of centrated in the Pale of Settlement (a western region of terrorism” that had then become known as “red ter- Were their actions infused with Imperial Russia) and in Ukraine and Belarussia, where ror” or the suppression of those in the Soviet Union Jewishness, a sense of Jewish they were 5% to 10% of the population, whereas in who deviated from the communist line. Russia itself the 1926 census found only 600,000 Jews. One of those whom Churchill singled out for op- mission like the tikkun olam and As a group in the vastness of the USSR, they were one probrium was Bela Kun, the Hungarian Jew who brief- of the largest minorities, alongside Georgians, Arme- ly played the leading role in Hungary when it was a *light unto the nations' values nians, Turks, Uzbeks, Kazakhs, Kyrgiz, Tartars, Moldo- Soviet republic in 1919. Kun fled when Hungary was we hear about today or were vians, Poles and Germans. None of these other groups invaded by Romania, fleeing to the Soviet Union played such a central role in the revolution, although where he was put in charge of the Revolutionary their actions strictly pragmatic as members of many of them rose to senior levels. Stalin Committee in Crimea along with Rosalia Zemlyach- was a Georgian. Felix Dzerzhinsky, who established ka. Their regime there was responsible for murdering a minority group struggling to be the Soviet secret police, was a Polish aristocrat. around 60,000 people. Kun was arrested during Sta- Given the Soviet Union’s complexity and predilec- lin’s purges, accused of promoting “Trotskyism” and part of larger society? tion for numerous layers of bureaucracy it is a difficult executed in 1938. His life was symbolic of so many to quantify the number of Jews throughout senior others: a young revolutionary whose idealism was “The Russian Revolution liberated the largest Jewish leadership positions during and just after the revolu- colored by the murderous methods of Communism community in the world. It also opened the floodgates tion of 1917.
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