Zydokomuna Atheism USSR Leadership Details Pinkus

The Jews of the Soviet Union: The History of a National Minority, by Benjamin Pinkus. 1990

Refreshing Candor About the Zydokomuna in the USSR. Are Real Jews. Drivers of Militant Atheism, and Overall Soviet Leadership, For Decades After the Russian Revolution

Israeli Jewish author Benjamin Pinkus begins with a history of Jews in Russia. Instead of solely blaming Christianity for the negative aspects of Jewish-Christian relations, he also points to the role of Jewish-Christian disputations, Jewish proselytism, and Judaizing sects. (pp. 4-5). As for the 1881-1906 pogroms in tsarist Russia, Pinkus believes that many of them occurred on too geographic an organized scale to be without some degree of government influence behind them. (pp. 28-31).

This work elaborates on the role of Jews in the development of Soviet Communism (sometimes called the Zydokomuna), and then traces the fate of Soviet Jews in the decades after the Russian Revolution. Pinkus emphasizes the increasingly anti-Semitic trends in the USSR, and provides considerable detail on the growing anti-Israel policy of the Soviet Union.

I now focus on a few specific issues:

SECULARISM AMONG JEWS

In 1936, Polish Cardinal August Hlond spoke of Jews as freethinkers and vanguards of Bolshevism. For this, he has been endlessly criticized. However, the self-atheization and Bolshevization of Poland’s Jews was not only factual, but had begun many decades earlier, when the Jews were subjects of tsarist Russia. Pinkus writes, (quote) The process of secularization was a characteristic of the modernization of the life of Jewish society in Russia. At the end of the nineteenth century the process was still a slow one, in spite of strong forces, both internal and external, which were weakening the traditional framework and threatening its breakdown. The process was accelerated, however, by historical factors operating before the First World War, and in particular the rapid development of Jewish socialist parties, practically all of them anti-religious. (unquote). (p. 33).

JEWS WERE THE MAIN DRIVING FORCE BEHIND THE MILITANT ATHEISM OF COMMUNISM

A few years after the Russian Revolution, in 1925, the “League of Unbelievers”, later renamed the “League of Fighting Unbelievers”, was founded in order to engage in intense anti-religious activity. In 1929, there were 200,000 Jewish members against 2,000 Germans and 500 Poles. (p. 102). Pinkus attributes the imbalance to Jewish secularism and the position of Jews in society, but does not go into any detail.

The Evsektsia [Yevsektsiya] played a leading role in the Communist war against Jewish religion. This included the closing of synagogues, and the forcing of Jews to work on the Sabbath and Holidays. (p. 101, 104). However, Pinkus does not examine the role of militantly atheistic Jews in the Communist war against Christianity in the Soviet Union.

In the USSR, Jewish religion underwent a precipitous decline. The number of synagogues in the Soviet Union fell from 1,103 in 1926, to 500 in 1945, and only about 100 in 1954. (p. 208, 288). By the 1970’s, only some 5-7% of Soviet Jews considered themselves religious. (pp. 297-298).

JEWS IN REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENTS

Back in 1907, Stalin published a report in which he stated that the majority of the Menshevik faction consisted of Jews. As for the Bolsheviks, he said that this faction was mostly Russian, and Jews were second. (p. 144).

It is interesting to note that many members of Jewish socialist organizations that were professedly non-Communist or even anti-Communist, later joined the Communists, if only under the auspices of their retention of autonomy. Thus, in early 1919, the Jewish Communist Party of Byelorussia was founded, and two-thirds of its delegates were former Bund members. (p. 129). Part of the Marxist Poalei Zion also joined the Communists, as did other Jewish organizations. (pp. 130-on).

ARE JEWISH COMMUNISTS JEWS? MOST CERTAINLY YES

It has been argued that Jews in Communism were usually those who had rejected their Jewishness. This is, at best, a half-truth. A Jew who is assimilated, or removed from Jewish practices, is still a Jew! In addition, even those Soviet Communist Jews that were the most hostile to Jewish religion and traditional Jewish ways still identified with Judaism, if only in a tribal sense. Thus, Pinkus notes that, (quote) In the 1920s and 1930s the custom of burying Jews only in Jewish cemeteries was observed even by the most fanatically anti-religious Evsektsia [Yevsektsiya] members. (unquote). (p. 105).

Benjamin Pinkus focuses on Soviet Jews who, even in relatively recent times, unambiguously considered themselves Jews despite their lack of even nominal affiliation with anything Jewish. For instance, the writer Lev Kopelev stated that he identified with his Jewishness despite finding nothing in his conscious mind that linked him with either the religious traditions or the nationalistic ideals of Judaism. (pp. 302-303).

JEWS IN LEADING COMMUNIST POSITIONS

Pinkus estimates that, in 1936, Jews comprised 2% of the Soviet population. (p. 81). He then presents data that shows that, in most Communist and Communist-sponsored organizations, Jews were overrepresented by at least a few-fold. However, when it came to leadership positions in the Soviet Union, Jews were routinely over-represented by a factor of at least ten, as elaborated in the next paragraphs:

(Quote) From 1903 to 1907 there were Jews among the leaders of the Bolshevik Party, which was run by Lenin as a clandestine organization, in each of the Troikas (“threes) that headed the party, at least until 1917, there was always one Jew, if not two, except for the years 1903 to 1905… (unquote). (p. 77).

(Quote) In the period between the February and October Revolutions in 1917, the percentage of Jews in the Bolshevik Party leadership rose…In April 1917, three of the nine members of the Central Committee were Jews: Kamenev, Zinovyev and Sverdlov. In August of that year, six of the twenty-one members of the Central Committee were Jews: Kamenev, Sokolnikov, Sverdlov, Zinovyev, Trotsky and Uritsky. It follows that despite the relatively small number of Jews in the Bolshevik Party, they held important posts in the leadership and were close associates of Lenin…What drew them to the Bolshevik Party was its centralizing and dictatorial character…(unquote). (p. 78).

(Quote) Jews held important posts in the Communist Party leadership in the 1920s and still had considerable power in the 1930’s. In 1918, four of the fourteen members of the Central Committee were Jews (Sverdlov, Trotsky, Zinovyev and Sokolnikov); in 1919, again four of the nineteen Central Committee members were Jews (Kamenev, Radek, Trotsky and Zinovyev), while in 1921 five of the twenty give-members (20%) were Jews. (unquote)…In the Politburo in the first half of the 1920’s the Jews comprised from 23% to 37% (Trotsky, Kamenev and Zinovyev)… (unquote). (p. 80).

Soon thereafter, Jews were largely removed from positions of power. Many died later in the purges of the 1930’s but, according to Pinkus, not necessarily because they were Jews. (p. 80, 174).

However, Jewish dominance continued well into the 1930’s, and part of it survived the purges. Pinkus comments, (quote) In 1936 (before the purges), there were six Jews among the twenty members of the Soviet government: Yagoda (Minister of the Interior and Security Services), L. Kaganovich (Communications), M. Litvinov (Foreign Affairs), Rozengolts (Foreign Trade), Y. Dreitser (Internal Trade), A. Kalmanovich (Agricultural Units). By 1939, the following Jewish Ministers and Deputy-Ministers were still in the government: L. Kaganovich, M. Kaganovich, B. Antselovich, M. Berman, L. Ginzburg, L. Vannikov and P. Zhemchuzhina-Molotov. (unquote). (p. 83). The latter was the wife of Vyacheslav Molotov. (p. 217).

JEWS VERSUS OTHER SOVIET MINORITIES IN LEADERSHIP POSITIONS

Pinkus continues and concludes, (quote) Thus, throughout the whole period, Jewish representation in the central administration was well above any proportional relation to the national ratio of the Jews in the Soviet Union, and very high in comparison with all other national minorities. We can say that the Jews in the Soviet Union took over the privileged position, previously held by the Germans in tsarist Russia. (unquote). (p. 83). [Those, such as neo-Stalinist Jan T. Gross, who emphasize the (relatively temporary and usually modest) overabundance of Poles and Latvians in leadership positions of the USSR, as some kind of exculpation for the long-term massive over-representation of Jews, thereby stand corrected.]

Finally, Pinkus’ analysis is incomplete. For instance, he does not examine the Jews in leadership positions in the NKVD, and the large percentage of commissars who were Jewish.