Dmitri Volkoganov on Lenin and Trotsky

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Dmitri Volkoganov on Lenin and Trotsky

Volkoganov was Director of the Institute For Military History in the USSR in its latest years. After the fall of the USSR he gained access to the previously-secret archives on Lenin.

Pavel Sudoplatov, Stalin's spymaster, attests that Volkogonov is a reputable historian, in his book SPECIAL TASKS (LITTLE, BROWN AND COMPANY, London 1994).

On p. 428, Sudoplatov introduces Volkogonov as "Colonel General Dmitri Volkogonov, who was writing biographies of Stalin and Trotsky ... "

In Footnote 10 on p. 428, Sudoplatov writes of him:

"Volkogonov was deputy chief of the Main Political Administration of the Soviet army, in charge of psychological warfare against the American armed forces in the 1970s and 1980s. He became director of the Institute of Military History of the Ministry of Defense in 1986." sudoplat.html.

In Volkogonov's biography Lenin, he writes of Lenin's Jewish self-identity: Lenin's sister Anna confirmed it in a letter to Stalin.

"{p. 8} In her letter to Stalin, Anna wrote, 'It's probably no secret for you that the research on our grandfather shows that he came from a poor Jewish family ...

"{p. 9} ' ... she also asserted ... 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 the 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'..

"But a little over a year later, Anna approached Stalin again, asserting that 'in the Lenin Institute, as well as in the Institute of the Brain ... they have long recognized the great gifts of this nation and the extremely beneficial effects of its blood on the progeny of mixed marriages. Ilyich himself rated their revolutionary qualities highly, contrasting it with the more sluggish and unstable character of the Russians. He often pointed out that the great [attributes of] organization and the strength of the revolutionary bodies in the south and west [of Russia] arose precisely from the fact that 50 per cent of their members were of that nationality.' But Stalin, the Russified Georgian, could not allow it to be known that Lenin had Jewish roots, and his strict prohibition remained firmly in place."

"{p.xxxvii} He {Lenin} went on: 'Hand out the work to Russian idiots: send the cuttings here, but not occasional issues (as these idiots have been doing until now).'

"{p. 112} He {Lenin} might have been thinking of Parvus (or perhaps himself?) when he said to Gorky: 'the clever Russian is almost always a Jew or has Jewish blood in him.'"

{Trotsky in New York - 1917. The Kerensky government asked the British to release him from detention in Halifax, Canada}}

{p. 64} His sons went to school in New York and quickly learnt English. They had already acquired French in Paris and German in Vienna, and were growing up in a cosmopolitan environment and shared their father's life. Trotsky spent two months giving lectures in New York, Philadelphia and elsewhere. He met Nikolai Bukharin, Alexandra Kollontai and Grigori Chudnovsky, as well as a few other revolutionaries, but he had barely found his feet among his compatriots when exciting and at first incomprehensible news began arriving from Russia. It was reported from Petrograd that on 15 March two members of the Duma, Alexander Guchkov and Vasili Shulgin, had visited the Tsar in his headquarters at Pskov and accepted his abdication in favour of his brother, Grand Duke Michael. The Duma members had done their level best to save the monarchy, as was made clear by the leader of the liberals (Kadets), Paul Milyukov, who was reported as saying: 'We cannot leave the question of the form of our state structure open. We are thinking of a parliamentary and constitutional monarchy.' When Trotsky read this he flung the newspaper down in disgust and cried: 'The Kadets have crawled into the prompter's box and are chanting

{p. 65} their old line!' His wife was more philosophical: 'Lyova, what would you expect?' Later, when he was back in Russia, Trotsky would learn that Michael had said he would only accept the crown if it were the will of the people, as expressed in a constituent assembly, and since neither the early convocation of such a body, nor indeed Michael's own safety, could be promised by the members of the Provisional Govemment, Michael had followed Nicholas's example and abdicated. Three hundred years of the Romanov dynasty came to an end, and Russia was without a monarchy.

But what of the socialists? Where was Lenin? How would relations between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks be affected? Meanwhile, the news was dizzying. Could it really be true that the Red Flag was flying over the Winter Palace? Meetings that Trotsky attended in New York were triumphant. He was almost never at home. Having heard the news of the February revolution, he at once determined that his place was back in St Petersburg, now named Petrograd, and on 27 March, together with his family and some other Russians, he boarded the Norwegian steamer Christiania Fjord, bound for Europe.

When the ship was searched at the Canadian port of Halifax, the Trotsky family and a number of other Russian passengers were arrested. While in detention they learned that the British government had reported that Trotsky was travelling to Russia at the expense of the German government and with the intention of overthrowing the Provisional Government. Indeed, after his arrival in Petrograd the local newspapers continued to print this story. The issue remained controversial for decades, and conclusive proof was not available until the early 199Os, when access was finally obtained to Lenin's archives. These revealed that the Bolshevik Party had been covertly receiving large sums from the German government, with which they financed their propaganda among the troops and workers following the February revolution. But as early as 1917 well-informed observers were in no doubt that the Bolsheviks owed a great deal to financial aid from Germany, funnelled into Lenin's coffers by various channels and under different names.

After several protests against Trotsky's arrest appeared in the Bolshevik newspaper Pravda, the Provisional Government felt compelled to cable Halifax and request the release of the interned Russian citizens, and within three weeks, on 18 May, Trotsky was in Petrograd ...

{end}

(2) Conversations with an old Jewish man

Not long after I wrote my article Hiding Behind Auschwitz, I had some amazing  conversations with a Jewish man who must have assumed that I am Jewish on account of my surname. I commented to him that "Capitalism is a cruel system", which is my honest belief, when he agreed and went on to say, "Communism was the perfect system", because it was "one for all and all for one". Although he is an atheist, he also said, "What we have now is no good. The Jewish religion is 100%. [Even] Catholicism was not bad."

He also said, "They were all Jews - Marx was a Jew, Lenin was a Jew, X was a Jew, Y was a Jew." Even though I had read that Lenin considered himself a Jew, I was so stunned to hear him say so, that I missed catching the names of the X and the Y. This man had been a prisoner at the Belsen concentration camp. Yet he said to me, "Hitler did a lot of good for his people. Mussolini did a lot of good for his people. Mussolini's only mistake was to join with Hitler."

(3) Josepha Nedava on Trotsky

On Trotsky, the following is from Josepha Nedava's book Trotsky and the Jews (Nedava himself is Jewish):

Joseph Nedava, Trotsky and the Jews, The Jewish Publication  Society of America, Philadelphia 5732 / 1972.

{start quote} {p. 36} A Jewish journalist who knew Trotsky from the period of his stay in Vienna  ("when he used to play chess with Baron Rothschild in Cafe Central and  frequent Cafe Arkaden daily to read the press there") is even firmer on the  Yiddish issue: "He [Trotsky] knew Yiddish, and if at a later date, in his  autobiography, he pretends to know nothing about Jews and Judaism, then  this is nothing but a plain lie. He who had visited at Cafe Arkaden for years on end must have mastered both these matters to perfection. The language in  greatest use at that Cafe was - besides 'Viennese-German' - Yiddish."26 {see  note 26 below}

Trotsky of course had no objection to the Yiddish language as such (as Hebraists, for  instance, had, contending that Hebrew was the only national language of the Jews); this appears from his reply to Lazar Kling, the editor of the Jewish Trotskyite  organ in New York (Unzer Kamf - Our Struggle):

You ask, what is my attitude to the Yiddish language? - As to any other language. If  indeed I used in my autobiography the word "jargon," it is because in my youth the  Jewish language was not called "Yiddish," as it is today, but "jargon." This is how the Jews themselves called it, {continued below at p. 37}

{footnote 26 to the above is on p. 237:}

{p. 237} 26. M. Waldman, "Trotski be-Vina-Zikhronot" [Trotsky in Vienna - reminiscences], Ha'olam (Jerusalem) 27, no. 55 (2 October 1940): 864. Trotsky was a keen chess player; Ziv, Trotsky, p. 76. At those Vienna cafes he learned the colloquial Yiddish word kibitzer - "an onlooker . . . especially one who volunteers advice" (Webster's New World Dictionary). In a speech in Moscow he once said: "I lived as an emigre in Vienna for several years, and there they use a word which, it  seems to me, cannot be found in any other language - kibitzer. Remember this word - it will prove useful to you. This word designates a man who, seeing two people playing chess, takes without fail a seat nearby and always knows the very best move, and if you sit down to play a game with him, he proves to be an ignoramus after the first move"; Pravda, no. 219, 20 October 1922; and L. Trotsky, Pokolenie Oktyabrya (Moscow, 1924), p. 77. {end note 26}

{p. 37} at least, in Odessa, and they have injected into this word absolutely nothing  of slight. The word "Yiddish" has been made of common use, in any case, in France, for instance, only for the last 15-20 years.

{p. 106} Much more helpful to the suffering Jews in those dire days was Trotsky's sister, Olga Kamenev, wife of the influential Bolshevik

{p. 107} leader Lev Kamenev {one of the triumvirate who succeeded Lenin, with  Zinoviev and Stalin; of the three, only one was non-Jewish}.

{p. 195} Dr. Chaim Weizmann, the future Zionist leader, related in his  autobiography that "Switzerland - and this meant chiefly Berne and Geneva -  was, at the turn of the century, the crossroads of Europe's revolutionary  forces. Lenin and Plekhanov made it their center. Trotsky . . . was often there." ...

Trotsky must have followed very closely the Sixth Zionist Congress at Basle in 1903. Shortly after the close of the Second Social-Democratic Congress in London he arrived in Switzerland, at the very time when the Zionist  Congress was taking place, in August. It should be noted that this congress  marked the zenith of Dr. Herzl's activities, and the Zionist Organization was granted  an international status following the diplomatic negotiations which had been carried on  by the British government with its representatives. Preparations for convening the  Zionist Congress were well publicized by the world press, and Trotsky was attracted  - either on his own account or through his Bundist acquaintances - to

{p. 196} attend its proceedings. He read the Zionist organ Die Welt, as well as the  general press, which reflected the keen interest in the Zionist movement even among  non-Zionist and non-Jewish circles. ...

{p. 204} On his arrival in Mexico in January 1937, Trotsky granted several interviews  to the press, in which he expressed his views on Jewish problems. He admitted that with  Hitler's rise to power in Germany, things had altered considerably for European Jewry.  Agonizingly he had to reappraise his former assumptions:

During my youth I rather leaned toward the prognosis that the Jews of different  countries would be assimilated and that the Jewish question would thus disappear, as it  were, automatically. The historical development of the last quarter of a century has  not confirmed this view. Decaying capitalism has everywhere swung over to an  intensified nationalism, one aspect of which is anti-Semitism. The Jewish question has loomed largest in the most highly developed capitalist country of Europe, Germany.

Trotsky still did not concede that the Jewish question could be solved within the framework of the capitalist system; but assimilation, as a kind of self-regulating  process which might have taken care of the problem over an extended period of time, could no longer be relied upon; its pace was not speedy enough to cope with the  appearance of such radically destructive movements as nazism. Palliatives, therefore,  had to be sought, and Trotsky was driven to admit the existence of one of them -  territorialism. "The Jews of different countries," he said, "have created  their press and developed the Yiddish language as an instrument adapted to  modern culture. One must therefore reckon with the fact that the Jewish nation  will maintain itself for an entire epoch to come." The admission of the  existence of a "Jewish nation" was a weird recantation on the part of  Trotsky, unless it was a mere semantic slip of the tongue.

Admitting in 1937 the need for a palliative solution to the Jewish problem but  realizing, of course, that Zionism was basically a territorial movement.  Trotsky took issue with it, not on the grounds of substance, but rather practical  viability. He said so explicitly:

We must bear in mind that the Jewish people will exist a long time. The nation cannot  normally exist without common territory. Zionism springs from this very idea. But the  facts of every passing day demon-

{p. 205} strate to us that Zionism is incapable of resolving the Jewish question. The  conflict between the Jews and Arabs in Palestine acquires a more and more  tragic and more and more menacing character. I do not at all believe that the  Jewish question can be resolved within the framework of rotting capitalism and under the control of British imperialism.

In his interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Trotsky recalled that  he had been inclined toward the idea of assimilation of Jews, but had  changed his attitude because of "historical developments."

He then brought up a new concept, which had never before preoccupied the  minds of Marxist doctrinaires: emigration. Orthodox socialism, which claims to be  anchored in the underlying fraternity of the human race, does not envisage the need for transplanting peoples in order to solve social problems. Trotsky, however, admits to  the peculiarity of the Jewish problem in this respect too:

Socialism will open the possibility of great migrations on the basis of the  most developed technique and culture. It goes without saying that what is here  involved is not compulsory displacements, that is, the creation of new ghettos for  certain nationalities, but displacements freely consented to, or rather demanded, by certain nationalities or parts of nationalities. The dispersed Jews who would want to be reassembled in the same community will find a sufficiently extensive  and rich spot under the sun. The same possibility will be opened for the Arabs, as for all other scattered nations. National topography will become a part of  the planned economy. This is the great historic perspective as I see it. To work for international Socialism means to work also for the solution of the Jewish question.* {Why does Trotsky mention the Arabs, if not implying that Palestine would  be given to the Jews? H. G. Wells also envisaged mass migration in his world state.}

Here Trotsky may have prophetically adumbrated the national renascence  which sprouted among wide sections of Soviet Jewry, which, following the  Six-Day War of 1967, has assumed the form of a persistent struggle for the  right of immigration to Israel.?

* Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 18 January 1937.

? It is noteworthy that P. B. Akselrod anticipated Trotsky by many years in  defending the idea of Jewish immigration to Palestine. See Deich, Yiden in der  Rusisher Revolutsie, 1:9.

{p. 206} In June 1937 Mrs. Beba Idelson, a Russian-born Jewish socialist Zionist leader in Palestine, visited Trotsky in Mexico. First she participated  in a press conference at Diego Rivera's residence and then had a long conversation  with Trotsky in his study. The following are some of her recollections of  that conversation:

I told him who I was, and that at the time I had been expelled from Russia as a  Zionist-Socialist. If he was interested, I would tell him about our life in Palestine.  Trotsky got up from his chair, asked me to wait awhile, and soon returned with his  wife. He introduced me to her and asked me to tell him everything. He wanted to know about Palestine and was happy to hear a report from a person living there.

I talked to him not as one talks to a stranger. A feeling accompanied me all the  time that he was a Jew, a wandering Jew, without a fatherland. This brought  me closer to him, aroused in me confidence that my story was addressed to a man who was  able to understand. I interrupted my story several times, asking him whether he was sure he had the time to listen to me, and he urged me to continue, jotted down some  points, and then began to question me: How many Jews are there in Palestine? Where do  they reside; is it only in towns? He asked numerous questions about the kibbutzim and  the Histadrut. Are we able to work in harmony with the employers within the framework  of the Zionist Organization; how do we bring Jews to Palestine and how do they join our  party; how is our young generation being brought up and what is its language? He asked  me to say a few sentences in Hebrew and smiled at the sound of the language. He wrote  several words and noted down mainly the names of the Zionist leaders, the parties, the Histadrut, and various places in Palestine. He showed interest as if he were a man  hearing about an unknown land, but I was under the impression that the subject absorbed his thought and heart.

The conversation lasted nearly three hours. After telling how we were fighting  for Jewish immigration into our country, and he was deeply immersed in thought, I asked  him: "Here is a country that is ready to admit you; perhaps you, too, will go to  Palestine?" I felt that a shiver ran through his spine. He replied with a calm  question: "Wouldn't you be afraid to accept me?" I answered: "No, we won't be afraid, for our idea is stronger than any fear of any man, even of a man like you." Trotsky  came over to me, pressed my hand, and said: "Thank you. It is a long time since I have  felt so good. But you should know that I have friends throughout the world. We have not renounced our views,

{p. 207} even though I am rejected by Stalin and his Oprichniks [this is Trotsky's  expression, referring to the special corps created by Ivan the Terrible to fight treason which instituted the reign of terror]. I have friends, and they are also  persecuted." I told him that his persecuted friends lived in their own countries, whereas he had no country of refuge, for he was a Jew. Trotsky nodded agreement.

We had lunch together. His wife showed no interest in our conversation. From time to time she would address questions to him, but he would put off his reply and then turn to me with further questions about matters relating to Palestine. He was  particularly interested in our relations with our Arab neighbors. He asked me whether there were Communists in Palestine, and why they did not go to Russia instead of staying in a Zionist country. He also wanted to know whether the Communist party was legal, big or small. When I told him that the Communists were not among the builders of  the kibbutzim ("communes," as Trotsky called them), he laughed, commenting: "They do not have this in Russia, either." He was very interested in the status of women in  Palestine, and also asked a personal question - how I had arrived in Mexico and what the nature of my mission was. He showed me his library, which filled a large hall, consisting of books in various languages; I realized how spiritually attached he was to this single possession of his in exile. I asked him: "Should you be obliged to leave Mexico - what will you do with this library: perhaps you would transfer it to Palestine?'

When we renewed our conversation after the meal, he listened attentively to what I told him about the cultural work being carried on in our country, about the libraries in each and every settlernent, about the National Library in Jerusalem, about the Hebrew  press. I can no longer recall all his questions, but I cannot forget how attentively he listened to what I told him about our children, the sabras, and their love of their fatherland. I noticed that my words penetrated deep into his heart, that he was glad to  hear about a world from which he had dissociated himself. I sensed that he was listening not like a man who placed himself above all nationality, and that our great idea found an echo in his heart.

At the end of our conversation Trotsky asked me not to publish the fact of our meeting and its contents: "Let the matter remain between us. The world  will not understand. People will seek in this, too, grounds for accusing me of harboring alien views, and perhaps even sympathy for Zionism." I promised  him this and kept my promise for nineteen years.

{end quote}
More from Nedava at nedava.html.

(4) Letter to Israel Shamir & Henry Makow

4.1 Henry Makow writes that the "Enlightenment" is actually a Luciferian Revolt: http://www.etherzone.com/2003/mako090803.shtml.

4.2 Israel Shamir wrote:

[shamireaders] Discussion on Communism

Date:   Thu, 2 Oct 2003 21:36:03 +0300  From:  "Israel Shamir" <shamir@home.se>

Preface

Our friend anti-Zionist Henry Makow promoted on his site http://www.savethemales.ca a book by an Estonian writer Juri Lina who happened to combine hatred to Jews, Christianity and Communism. Lina wrote: "Both Christianity and Marxism were created with a view to slavery" - that is really Hitlerite line that any neo-con would subscribe to. I actually share his idea of similarity of 'Christians and Communists', and belong to both. But what he curses, I bless daily in the church.

For whatever was its conception, the Communism as it became known in the second half of the 20th century was a wonderful humanistic faith of mutual support, heavily influenced by the Orthodox Christianity of Russia. Many anti-communist theories and 'facts' are provided in order to facilitate the great robbery of Russia in 1991 and the rest of the Third World. Lina collected all garbage produced by CIA- paid anticommunists of Russia.  Otherwise, he reprocessed the old stuff well known to all of us.

As for Jews, by stretching this term to infinity (from Proudhon to Torquemada, from Lenin to Robespierre, and to practically every non-Estonian)  he makes it meaningless. In no way one can desribe Lenin or Marx as 'Jews'. Marx was a Christian, and a strongest anti-Jewish voice from St Paul to modernity, Lenin was a Russian noble and a (lapsed) Christian, who fought the Jewish Bund and was shot by a Jewish assassin. If a few drops of Jewish blood would qualify for calling a man - a Jew, we would have a billion of Jews. ... {endquote}

4.3 Juri Lina's book - reply to Henry Makow and Israel Shamir

Israel & Henry,

I have a copy of Juri Lina's book Under the Sign of the Scorpion, and find it a mixture of valuable information I did not know before, and unsubstantiated statements. I would like to see it rewritten, with the latter either backed-up or removed.

Making sense of the Soviet Union and East Bloc has become more important that we thought 10 years ago. My websitesite, while not comprehensive, provides a lot of "missing" information about the stages the USSR went through.

1. The early, pre-Stalin, phase, was set up by Non-Theistic Jews. I provide verification of this from reliable sources. See the information provided above, and zioncom.html.

Non-theistic Judaism is a religion, a variation of Judaism: philos.html.

When I say that they were Jews, this is not a matter of blood, but of their own personal Identity - they way they saw things. That can change over time. No-one should be categorised, judged or imprisoned by factors he or she did not choose, such as ancestry or the name given by parents.

There's no point in denying it; however, interpreting it is another matter.

One interpretation might stress "benevolence": this faction of Jews is ruling for the benefit of the lower orders. Another interpretation stresses "malevolence": the hijacking of the socialist movement for their own totalitarian purposes.

2. Stalin rose to power for a number of reasons:

- because the Red Army's attempt in 1920 to smash Poland and reach Germany failed

- because Trotsky was feared by other Jewish Bolsheviks. When Lenin died, power passed to a triumvirate: Kamenev, Zinoviev, Stalin. Of these, Stalin was the only non-Jew

- because Trotsky did not attend Lenin's funeral

- and perhaps, because of hostility to Jewish domination; this factor increased later

3. Stalin was brutal, but his brutality was, in part, directed against the non-theistic Jewish Bolsheviks ... who in time, came to reassess Trotsky and coalesce around him as the rival leader, the exiled pretender to the throne. Thus Isaac Deutscher, in his book The Prophet Outcast, records Trotsky's aspiration - even in 1939 - to return to the USSR in the wake of Stalin's overthrow (Victory in Defeat: pp. 510ff).

Deuscher articulated a strong Jewish Identity: deutscher.html.

4. The plan by the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committe for a Jewish Republic in the Crimea, the Baruch Plan of 1946 for World Government, and the rallying of Soviet Jews to Israel (eg at Golda Meir's visit) affected Stalin's perception of Jewish solidarity with Jews in the US and Israel. Moscow & Jerusalem became rival centres representing divergent visions of socialism. This was an unseen Cold War: sudoplat.html.

5. Stalin was murdered, within 2 months of the Doctors Plot being announced; Zionism was one of the issues in his murder: death-of-stalin.html.

The murderers comprised a "Jewish" faction (Beria, Kaganovich et al) and a "Russian" faction (Khruschev et al). Beria, of the Jewish faction, took power, and instituted "reforms" of the type Gorbachev was to repeat later. East Germany began to collapse ... in response, the "Russian" faction was able to overthrow Beria and install Khruschev: beria.html.

6. Gorbachev seems to have removed the totalitarian aspects of Communism; on that account, he may have been the best ruler. But he was aiming at Beria's "Convergence" policy, i.e. at a World Government, a Single Civilization uniting East & West. For this, he thought he must dismantle the heritage of Stalin, including the East Bloc: convergence.html.

7. Convergence is associated, loosely, with the Trotskyist movement, which is also loosely called "Marxist Anti-Communist" (see kostel.html) and "New Left": new-left.html. The magazine New Left Review, for example, was closely attuned to the ideas of Isaac Deutscher, a champion of Trotsky.

8. Convergence is also associated with the "Open Conspiracy" for World Government: wells-lenin-league.html.

9. The kind of "Marxism" we now have in the West is the Trotskyist kind. Thus the Greens promote Gay Marriage and Open Borders. The Gay & Radical Feminist movements are following the policies of the Trotskyist period of the USSR, during which Marriage was officially abolished and homosexuality (including sodomy) normalised. Stalin re-instituted marriage, and made sodomy a crime: sex-soviet.html.

{end}

(5) "Lenin ... fought the Jewish Bund and was shot by a Jewish assassin" - Israel Shamir

The Bund is a Jewish-separatist socialist organisation, a member of the Socialist International.

The Socialist International (SI) was anti-Stalin, favouring the separation of East Europe from the Soviet bloc and its incorporation into a united Europe.

Yet the SI promoted International Socialism. Willy Brandt was a prominent leader of the SI; in Australia, Gough Whitlam promoted it. Some details at http://www.iisg.nl/archives/gias/s/10769647.html.

(5.1) "Lenin ... fought the Jewish Bund and was shot by a Jewish assassin"

Date: Mon, 30 Aug 2004 23:47:22 +0300 From: "Israel Shamir" <shamir@home.se>

: You wrote, "Lenin ... fought the Jewish Bund and was shot by a Jewish assassin"

: Is this the woman called Kaplan?

Dear Peter, yes, Fanny Kaplan. No she was not a Bundist, but an SR (socialist revolutionary).

: Did the shooting have a connection with Lenin's crackdown on the Bund?

I have not heard of direct connection, and I did not claim there is. Still it is probably Lenin was not seen as a good guy for nationally aware Jews; the Jews in the Party were anything but nationally minded as a rule.

: I understand that the doctors could not remove the bullet from Lenin's : head. Did this shooting cause Lenin's later strokes ... and early death?

It is very possible that this wound caused Lenin's premature death.

(5.2) Fanny Kaplan shot Lenin on August 30, 1918; who were the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs)?

Dmitri Volkogonov, Lenin: Life and Legacy, translated and edited by Harold Shukman (HarperCollinsPublishers, London, 1994):

{p. 172} There was, it is true, a moment when the Left SRs wanted to merge with the Bolsheviks, but, as Trotsky recalled, Lenin decided to 'let them wait'.

But, for a time, the collaboration was a fact. Of the twenty members of the Cheka Collegium, seven were Left SRs, including Dzerzhinsky's deputies Alexandrovich and Zaks. In April 1918 the Left SRs helped the Bolsheviks to crush the Anarchists (who were splintered into a host of groupings, some of them supporting the Bolsheviks, most opposed to Lenin's strong, centralized form of government), and also helped to spread Bolshevik influence in the countryside by supporting the infamous decree of 13 May 1918 which legitimized the confiscation of grain from the peasants. Before the introduction of the New Economic Policy in 1921, force was virtually the sole means employed by the regime to bring the peasants under its control.

It soon became clear, however, that the Bolsheviks did not want to share power with any party. When the Left SRs opposed the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, under which Lenin withdrew from the war at huge cost, and resigned from the government, the Bolsheviks heaved a sigh of relief, and smashed them as a party on 6-7 July 1918 by mass arrests and deportations to prisons and concentration camps.

Lenin was less concerned with unstable allies like the Left SRs and drop-outs from Vikzhel than he was with the impending Constituent Assembly. ... Despite his promise of land, Lenin knew that the peasants would not vote for the Bolsheviks, but would support the Socialist Revolutionaries as the more familiar party.

{p. 173} It was not possible to complete the election in one day - in some places it took the entire month of December. 703 deputies were elected, of whom only 168 were Bolsheviks. The SRs won 299 seats, the Left SRs 39, the Mensheviks 18, the Popular Socialists 4, the Kadets 17, and 158 were elected from various national groups.

{p. 341} Lenin could scarcely conceal his dissatisfaction that the SR programme, while socialist in essence, said nothing about the dictatorship of the proletariat, and put the land problem in the context of the traditional peasant commune. The SRs saw the state as an auxiliary element.

{p. 346} The SRs, who were regarded as the defenders of the peasants' interests, bitterly criticized the Bolsheviks. In 1921 their Central Committee published an underground pamphlet entitled 'What Have the Bolsheviks Given the People?' It stated:

{quote} From the start of their accursed empire the Bolsheviks have shown themselves to be enemies of the peasants. They sent armed detachments into the countryside to get grain ... The peasant cannot breathe freely it's either confiscations or loading duties, or tree-cutting or the army, and bring your carts with you, or bring your last livestock for slaughter. There are ninety million peasants in Russia, that is, the huge majority. But what part do they have in running the state? {endquote}

(5.3) More on the Jewish Bund - from J. Landowsky, Pavel Sudoplatov, Jaff Schatz, George Bailey

Shamir rejects Red Symphony, and I cannot be sure of its veracity - Peter M.

(5.3.1) RED SYMPHONY, by Dr. J. Landowsky, translated by George Knupffer (Christian Book Club of America P.O. Box 900566 Palmdale, CA 93590-0566, First Printed 1968 Reprinted 2002):

{p. 29} It was not for nothing that the real party of the "non-party" Trotzky was the ancient "Bund" of the Jewish proletariat, from which emerged all the Moscow revolutionary branches, and to whom it gave 90% of its leaders; not the official and well-known Bund, but the secret Bund which had been infiltrated into all the Socialist parties, the leaders of which were almost all under its control.

G. - And Kerensky too?

R. - Kerensky too ..., and also some other leaders who were not Socialists, the leaders of the bourgeois political fractions.

G. - How is that?

R. - You forget about the role of freemasonry in the first phase of the democratic-bourgeois revolution?

G. - Were they also controlled by the Bund?

R. - Naturally, as the nearest step, but in fact subject to "Them."

G. - Despite the rising tide of Marxism which also threatened their lives and privileges?

R. - Despite all that; obviously they did not see that danger. Bear in mind that every mason saw and hoped to see in his imagination more that there was in reality, because he imagined that which was profitable for him. As a proof of the political power of their association they saw that masons were in governments and at the pinnacle of the States of the bourgeois nations, while their numbers were growing all the time. Bear in mind that at that time the rulers of all the Allied nations were freemasons, with very few exceptions. This was to them an argument of great force. They fully believed that the revolution would stop at the bourgeois republic of the French type.

{end} red-symphony.html

(5.3.2) SPECIAL TASKS : THE MEMOIRS OF AN UNWANTED WITNESS - A SOVIET SPYMASTER, by Pavel Sudoplatov and Anatoli Sudoplatov, with Jerrold L. and Leona P. Schecter (LITTLE, BROWN AND COMPANY, London, 1994):

{p. 288} In the early 1920s, when the Bolshevik regime was first establishing itself, there was a preponderance of Jewish names in administrative positions at all levels because they had the education to fill these jobs. At this time there were no internal passports in Russia, so people were not officially identified as Jews or other nationalities. In 1922 and 1923 there was a rapid roundup of the leaders of all Jewish and other nationalist underground groups. The Police of Zion organization (Politzi Tzion) was extremely active, for example, and outmaneuvered GPU surveillance teams in Odessa; the Zionists led the secret service officers to a remote cemetery and then turned on them and beat them. Haganah had its origins in Zhitomir in the Ukraine, but the irony is that the Jews who worked in the Ukrainian GPU were put in charge of the operations against the Zionist underground groups. The crackdown included the Jewish Bund, a socialist organization that was a member of the Socialist International.

The Jewish Communist party, a splinter group from the Jewish Bund, was also dissolved. This was the Bolshevik policy, to eliminate any political national splinter group in or out of the Communist party. The separatist Ukrainian Communist party was also dissolved. The Communist Party of the Ukraine (Bolsheviks) was the established and approved political party. It was the only party with its own politburo. The Jewish leadership was either exiled or permitted to emigrate. Before 1928, there was no barrier to emigrating; the procedure for leaving the country was simpler than now. The effect of the loss of these leaders was that Jews no longer had any political organizations and lost their Jewish identity. The Jewish intelligentsia lost its political roots. In 1933 the internal passport system was introduced, and Jews were identified as a national group, even though they had no republic to be their homeland. In every major ministry at this time, Jews held top positions. I scarcely remember the directive of the Central Committee in 1939, after the Great Purge, to look into how many people of any one nation-

{p. 289} ality were occupying key positions in sensitive ministries, but it was more potent than I perceived it to be. For the first time, an effective quota system came into being. Fortunately, most of my comrades-in-arms {Jewish?}, men and women who became distinguished fighters, agents, and officers during the war, were already in place and were not affected by this directive.

{end} sudoplat.html

(5.3.3) Jaff Schatz, The Generation: The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Communists of Poland, Uni. Of California Press, Berkeley, 1991:

{p. 34} The young assimilationists placed their hopes in the Polish left, although some, disappointed by anti-Jewish hostility, found their way back into the Jewish world as Zionists or Bundists.

{p. 42} ... messianic activism, called by its opponents a "wrong messianism" or "mad messianism," was never entirely wiped out. As a nearly permanent latent factor, it has repeatedly manifested itself in Jewish history in the form of different messianic movements. ... The

{p. 43} Zionists, the Bundists, and the Jewish Communists shared the same messianic activism and emancipatory ideal, the token of all modern Jewish secular politics. ... To point out the central significance of messianic traditions in modern Jewish ideology, identity, and politics does not mean that this tradition is an exclusively Jewish possession. In secularized form, elements of the messianic idea permeated the European Enlightenment and the French and Industrial revolutions. Under the influence of religious and political liberalism, urbanization, and industrialization, and united with elements of utopian thought, messianic millennialism was transformed into the modern idea of progress. However, if the messianic idea was of such great significance within the general society, it was immensely more so in the community that created and carried it throughout the ages. The messianic tradition permeated Jewish civilization to such a degree that it became one of its very central, even when latent, features and a backbone of its popular culture. It resisted the impact of secularization and acculturation, the challenge of modernity, by transforming itself into radical political options, in which activist forces were immensely strengthened.

{p. 51} ... some of the radical peers were to become Bundists, some others Zionists, and still others Communists.

{p. 52} The Bundist vision lost its social substance with the physical disappearance of the large Yiddish-speaking radical Jewish working class. As the Communists took over Poland, the Bundists had to capitulate: they either became resigned fellow travelers or emigrated.

{p. 114} ... For these young Communists, there existed an increasing gap of totally different values, attitudes, and images separating them from their parents and their "world of yesterday." As the gap between the generation grew, the Communist movement increasingly became a substitute for their original families. This phenomenon was not exclusively Communist. The Zionist and Bundist movements, with their large profile of activities-

{p. 115} schools, summer camps, social clubs, and so on - and the fact of their legality, were able to function as social substitutes for the family. They "helped give party members the feeling that they resided in a 'new world,' as opposed to the 'old world' of the home and the synagogue."

{p. 232} ... In 1948 they (and the Bund) had to join the Zionists in fund-raising, the recruitment of volunteers for Haganah (which soon became the official Israeli army), and in military training, all carried out with the quiet blessing of the authorities. On Israel's victory in the war for independence, several Jewish Communists were provided with party contacts and sent to Israel with officially proclaimed wishes for good luck in the task of building socialism there.

{p. 252} An important ideological signal that precluded the final Communist offensive in the Jewish sector was Ilya Ehrenburg's Pravda article of September 21, 1948. This obviously offficially sanctioned article condemned Zionism as "mysticism," denied that there was any afffinity between Jews of different countries, condemned Jewish nationalism, stressed the necessity of class struggle in the newly created Jewish state, and declared that Communism and not the bourgeois-governed State of Israel was the solution to the Jewish problems.

{p. 254} ... This was soon followed by deep and lasting political and organizatlonal changes in the Jewish sector. Separate Jewish schools, which previously had been subordinated to the CKZP, were at the beginning of the 1949-50 school year taken into the state budget and soon wholly incorporated into the national school system. The vocational ORT schools were taken over by the state in 1950. Toward the end of 1949, against the wishes of the CKZP and the Communist activists, the American Joint Distribution Committee (AJDC) was ousted from Poland as part of the severing of contacts with the West. The Jewish welfare institutions and the Jewish theater, which had been operating with AJDC aid, were nationalized. Jewish libraries were merged with non-Jewish ones, the Jewish Writers Association, Jewish youth organizations, and the lands-

{p. 255} manshaften were either dissolved or merged with national organizations. At the end of 1949, the Jewish cooperative movement Solidarnosc was merged with its Polish counterpart. After having been under intense ideological attack, the Bundists were made to retract their "rightist-nationalist tendencies" and reject their "separatist" program of national-cultural autonomy. Sharing the fate of the PPS, the Bund was dissolved on January 16, 1949, and some of its members admitted to the Communist party. The Zionist parties and organizations were disbanded later that year. The Union of Jewish Religious Congregations changed its name to the Union of Congregations of the Mosaic Faith, and its contacts with Jewish organizations abroad were greatly limited. Finally, the by then totally Communist-dominated CKZP was in October 1950 officially merged with the Jewish Cultural Society to form the TSKZ. Thus, the Jewish sector was reshaped. It was reduced and reconstructed beyond recognition and its remaining institutions placed under exclusive political and ideological Communist domination. From being merely a minor factor among Polish Jewry, Jewish Communists were now in total command of what remained.

{end} schatz.html

(5.3.4) George Bailey, The Making of Andrei Sakharov, Allen Lane the Penguin Press, London 1989:

{p. 129} In pre-revolutionary Russia Jewish youth provided the cadres of revolutionary parties and organizations in large part. This was especially true of the Bund, which was in a class by itself. The Jewish Social Democratic Union (Bund), although specifically Jewish, was the oldest, most active and for a long while the most effective element of the Russian social democratic movement. 'When the first Zionist congress met in Basel in 1897 and in the same year the first all-Russian congress of the Bund took place,' runs the report, 'giving expression to both national and social radicalism, the enthusiasm aroused among the Jews of Russia was vast and overwhelming.' From the very first, then, the contest between Zionism and Communism was given. Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, with his idea of the agrarian production collectives or kibbutzim, was a socialist of the first wafer. The Bund became wholly devoted to Zionism, ultimately providing the leaders and cadres for the founding and building of the state of Israel.

The Bolshevik Party was no exception to the other revolutionary parties: about one half of the Central Committee's members were Jews. All key positions and posts of power within the Central Committee were occupied by Jews. There was Trotsky, the commander and in no small part creator of the Red Army and the political leader second only to Lenin. There was Sverdlov, who headed the regime and was Lenin's right-hand man; Zinoviev, leader of the Comintern and Party boss of Petrograd; Kamenev, Lenin's first deputy in the Council of People's Commissars, manager of the Soviet economy and head of the Moscow Party organization. In the Politburo of 1921 all members excepting only Lenin and Stalin were Jews.

{end} convergence.html

(5.3.5) Trotsky on Ukranian separatism

Joseph Nedava, Trotsky and the Jews (The Jewish Publication Society of America, Philadelphia, 5732/1972):

{p. 219} By envisioning an "independent Jewish republic," Trotsky in fact placed the Jewish problem in the Soviet Union on the same basis as the Ukrainian problem. During the last year of his life Trotsky came out openly in favor of the establishment of "a united, free, and independent workers' and peasants' Soviet Ukraine." He was willing to go the whole way of granting self-determination to the Ukraine, even to the extent of separation from the Soviet Union. "The fervid worship of state boundaries is alien to us. We do not hold the position of a 'united and indivisible' whole. After all, even the constitution of the USSR acknowledges the right of its component federated peoples to self-determination, that is, to separation." He expected that such an independent Ukraine "might subsequently join the Soviet federation; but voluntarily, on conditions which it itself considers acceptable." {end}

The coup against Gorbachev was prompoted by his plan for a referendum on a Union Treaty, which also offered the possibility of secession. He was following - whether he knew it or not - the path set out by Trotsky above. But whereas Trotsky countenanced the breakup of Stalin's USSR, would he have done so if he himself were in charge?

{end} nedava.html

If, prior to the Russian Revolution, Trotsky used to play chess with Baron Rothschild in Vienna, why didn't Trotsky capture Rothschild as he later helped capture the Tsar, in the name of the Working Class?

The admission by Lazar Kaganovich's relative, that Bolshevism was imposed on the Russians by non-theistic Jews:  kaganovich.html.

Dmitri Volkogonov on Trotsky's role in the Kronstadt Massacre: kronstadt.html.

Bertrand Russell's observation of the Jewish role in early Bolshevism: russell.html.

Making sense of Stalin: stalin.html.

Debate with Israel Shamir, Phil Eversoul & Eric Walberg over Lenin's Jewish Identity: letters.html#19.

Back to the Zionism/Communism index: zioncom.html.

Write to me at contact.html.

http://www.mailstar.net/lenin-trotsky.html