Kevin MacDonald-Jews as a hostile elite in the USSR

STALIN’S WILLING EXECUTIONERS

JEWS AS A HOSTILE ELITE IN THE USSR

The Jewish Century

Yuri Slezkine

Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004

$29.95 (cloth)

x + 438 pages

Reviewed by Kevin MacDonald

A persistent theme among critics of Jews—particularly those on the

pre-World War II right—has been that the Bolshevik revolution was a

Jewish revolution and that the Soviet Union was dominated by Jews.

This theme appears in a wide range of writings, from Henry Ford’s International

Jew, to published statements by a long list of British, French, and American

political figures in the 1920s (Winston Churchill, Woodrow Wilson, and David

Lloyd George), and, in its most extreme form, by Adolf Hitler, who wrote:

Now begins the last great revolution. By wresting political power

for himself, the Jew casts off the few remaining shreds of disguise

he still wears. The democratic plebeian Jew turns into the blood Jew

and the tyrant of peoples. In a few years he will try to exterminate the

national pillars of intelligence and, by robbing the peoples of their

natural spiritual leadership, will make them ripe for the slavish lot of a

permanent subjugation. The most terrible example of this is Russia.1

This long tradition stands in sharp contradiction to the official view,

promulgated by Jewish organizations and almost all contemporary historians,

that Jews played no special role in Bolshevism and indeed were specifically

victimized by it. Yuri Slezkine’s book provides a much needed resolution

to these opposing perspectives. It is an intellectual tour de force, alternately

muddled and brilliant, courageous and apologetic.

APOLLONIANS AND MERCURIANS

One of the muddled elements, apparent at the beginning and present

throughout The Jewish Century, is Slezkine’s claim that the peoples of the world

can be classified into two groups. The successful peoples of the modern world,

66 Vol. 5, No. 3 The Occidental Quarterly

termed Mercurians, are urban, mobile, literate, articulate, and intellectually

sophisticated. Distinguished by their ability to manipulate symbols, they pursue

“wealth for the sake of learning, learning for the sake of wealth, and both

wealth and learning for their own sake” (p. 1). Since Slezkine sees Jews as the

quintessential Mercurians, he regards modernization as essentially a process

of everyone becoming Jewish. His second group, which he calls Apollonians,

is rooted in the land and in traditional agrarian cultures, and prizes physical

strength and warrior values.

Slezkine conceptualizes Mercurianism as a worldview, and therefore a

matter of psychological choice, rather than as a set of psychological mechanisms,

the most important of which is general intelligence.2 As a result of this

false premise, he exaggerates the similarity among Mercurians, underestimates

the power of ethnocentrism as a unifying factor in Jewish history, and fails to

understand the roots of Western social and economic institutions.

Slezkine views Judaism as one of many Mercurian cultures—peoples that

dwell alone in Diasporas, living among strangers and often acting as economic

middlemen: the Overseas Chinese, Indians, and Lebanese, and the Gypsies and

Irish Travelers. Their common denominator, in Slezkine’s view (and mine3), is

their status as strangers to the people they live among—sojourners who, above

all else, do not intermarry or socialize with the locals. Their interactions with the

local Apollonians involve “mutual hostility, suspicion and contempt” (p. 20) and

a sense of superiority. Moreover, a “common host stereotype of the Mercurians is

that they are devious, acquisitive, greedy, crafty, pushy, and crude” (p. 23). The

Mercurians possess greater kin solidarity and internal cohesion than the people

they live among; they are characterized by extended families and patriarchal

social organization.

So far, so good, although I would stress that the family organization of such

groups derives more from the long-term adaptation to the culture areas they

originate from than from an adaptation to the nomadic, middleman niche.4 But

Slezkine maintains that Mercurians are above all smarter than the people they

live among: They are said to possess “cunning intelligence,” but it is surely a

mistake to consider such disparate groups as Jews (or the Overseas Chinese)

and Gypsies (or the Irish Travelers) as having in common a particular set of

intellectual traits. After all, the Jews, as Slezkine shows, have repeatedly become

an academic, intellectual, cultural, and economic elite in Western societies,

while Gypsies have tended toward illiteracy and are at best an economically

marginal group.

Slezkine imagines that the Gypsies and literate middleman groups like the

Jews or Overseas Chinese differ not in intelligence but only in whether they

express their intelligence through literacy or an oral culture: “Businessmen,

diplomats, doctors, and psychotherapists are literate peddlers, heralds,

healers, and fortune-tellers” (p. 29)—a formulation that will not stand the test

of current psychometric data. In fact, the general patterns of Gypsies are the

Fall 2005 / MacDonald 67

opposite of Jews: a low-investment, low-IQ reproductive style characterized

by higher fertility, earlier onset of sexual behavior and reproduction, more

unstable pair bonds, higher rate of single parenting, shorter interval of birth

spacing, higher infant mortality rate, and higher rate of survival of low birth

weight infants.5 Intelligence, for Slezkine, is a lifestyle choice, rather than a set

of brain processes underlying information processing and strongly influenced

by genetic variation. As we shall see, this formulation is very useful to Slezkine

as he constructs his argument later in the book.

In his attempt to paint with a very broad brush, Slezkine also ignores

other real differences among the Mercurians, most notably, I would argue,

the aggressiveness of the Jews compared to the relative passivity of the

Overseas Chinese. Both the Jews and the Overseas Chinese are highly intelligent

and entrepreneurial, but the Overseas Chinese have not formed a hostile

cultural elite in Southeast Asian countries, where they have chiefly settled,

and have not been concentrated in media ownership or in the construction

of culture. We do not read of Chinese cultural movements disseminated in

the major universities and media outlets that subject the traditional culture of

Southeast Asians and anti-Chinese sentiment to radical critique, or of Chinese

organizations campaigning for the removal of native cultural and religious

symbols from public places.6 Slezkine paints Jews as deeply involved in the

construction of culture and in the politics of the host societies, but the role of

the Chinese was quite different. The following passage describing the political

attitudes of the Overseas Chinese in Thailand could never have applied to

Jews in Western societies since the Enlightenment:

But few seem to know or indeed to care about the restrictions on

citizenship, nationality rights, and political activities in general, nor

are these restrictions given much publicity in the Chinese press. This

merely points up the fact, recognized by all observers, that the overseas

Chinese are primarily concerned with making a living, or amassing a

fortune, and thus take only a passive interest in the formal political life

of the country in which they live.7

Moreover, Slezkine pictures the middlemen as specializing in “certain

dangerous, marvelous, and distasteful” (p. 9), but nevertheless indispensable,

pursuits (p. 36)—a formulation that carries a grain of truth, as in places where

natives were prohibited from loaning money at interest. However, he ignores,

or at least fails to spell out, the extent to which Jews have been willing agents

of exploitative elites, not only in Western societies, but in the Muslim world as

well.8 This is the overarching generalization which one can make about Jewish

economic behavior over the ages. Their role went far beyond performing tasks

deemed inappropriate for the natives for religious reasons; rather they were

often tasks at which natives would be relatively less ruthless in exploiting

their fellows. This was especially the case in Eastern Europe, where economic

68 Vol. 5, No. 3 The Occidental Quarterly

arrangements such as tax farming, estate management, and monopolies on

retail liquor distribution lasted far longer than in the West:

In this way, the Jewish arendator became the master of life and death

over the population of entire districts, and having nothing but a shortterm

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 his relatives and co-religionists

in charge of the flour-mill, the brewery, and in particular of the lord’s

taverns 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, baptized infants,

newly-weds, and mourners. On the [royal] estates…, he became in effect

the Crown Agent, farming out the tolls, taxes, and courts, and adorning

his oppressions with all the dignity of royal authority.9

Jewish involvement in the Communist elite of the USSR can be seen as a

variation on an ancient theme in Jewish culture rather than a new one sprung

from the special circumstances of the Bolshevik Revolution. Rather than being

the willing agents of exploitative non-Jewish elites who were clearly separated

from both the Jews and the people they ruled, Jews became an entrenched

part of an exploitative and oppressive elite in which group boundaries were

blurred. This blurring of boundaries was aided by four processes, all covered by

Slezkine: shedding overt Jewish identities in favor of a veneer of international

socialism in which Jewish identity and ethnic networking were relatively invisible;

seeking lower-profile positions in order to de-emphasize Jewish preeminence

(e.g., Trotsky); adopting Slavic names; and engaging in a limited amount of

intermarriage with non-Jewish elites.10 Indeed, the “plethora of Jewish wives”

among non-Jewish leaders11 doubtless heightened the Jewish atmosphere of

the top levels of the Soviet government, given that everyone, especially Stalin,

appears to have been quite conscious of ethnicity.12 For their part, anti-Semites

have accused Jews of having “implanted those of their own category as wives and

husbands for influential figures and officials.”13

By emphasizing the necessity and distastefulness of traditional Jewish

occupations, Slezkine also ignores the extent to which Jewish competition

suppressed the formation of a native middle class in Eastern Europe. (This

has also occurred throughout Southeast Asia, because of competition from

the Overseas Chinese.) Instead, Slezkine sees Eastern Europeans, through

stereotypic lenses, as quintessential Apollonians, some of whom became

Mercurian modernists when forced to by circumstances, rather than as

containing elements that would have naturally aspired to and competently

performed the economic and cultural functions that instead came to be

performed by Jews because of their ability to create ethnic monopolies

in goods and services. When Jews won the economic competition in early

modern Poland, the result was that the great majority of Poles were reduced

to the status of agricultural laborers supervised by Jewish estate managers in

Fall 2005 / MacDonald 69

an economy in which trade, manufacturing, and artisanry were in large part

controlled by Jews.14 On the other hand, in most of Western Europe Jews had

been expelled in the Middle Ages. As a result, when modernization occurred,

it was accomplished with an indigenous middle class. If, as in Eastern Europe,

Jews had won the economic competition in most of these professions, there

would not have been a non-Jewish middle class in England. Whatever one

imagines might have been the fortunes and character of England with predominantly

Jewish artisans, merchants, and manufacturers, it seems reasonable

to suppose that the Christian taxpayers of England made a good investment

in their own future when they agreed to pay King Edward I a massive tax of

£116,346 in return for expelling two thousand Jews in 1290.15

While Slezkine’s treatment overemphasizes middlemen as a societal

necessity rather than as ethnic outsiders competing for scarce resources, he

does note that the rise of the Jews in the USSR came at the expense of the

Germans as a Mercurian minority in Russia prior to the Revolution. (Jews

were excluded from traditional Russia apart from the Pale of Settlement, which

included Ukraine, Lithuania, Byelorussia, Crimea, and part of Poland.) Germans

manned the imperial bureaucracy, formed a large percentage of professionals,

entrepreneurs, and artisans, were more literate than the Russians, and had a

sense of cultural superiority and ethnic solidarity:

And so they were, mutatis mutandis, head to the Russian heart, mind

to the Russian soul, consciousness to Russian spontaneity. They stood

for calculation, efficiency, and discipline; cleanliness, fastidiousness,

and sobriety; pushiness, tactlessness, and energy; sentimentality, love of

family, and unmanliness (or absurdly exaggerated manliness)…. Perhaps

paradoxically, in light of what would happen in the twentieth century,

Germans were, occupationally and conceptually, the Jews of ethnic Russia

(as well as much of Eastern Europe). Or rather, the Russian Germans were

to Russia what the German Jews were to Germany—only much more so.

So fundamental were the German Mercurians to Russia’s view of itself

that both their existence and their complete and abrupt disappearance

have been routinely taken for granted (pp. 113–114).

Although the replacement of Germans by Jews was well under way by

the time of the Bolshevik Revolution, a key consequence of the Revolution

was the substitution of one Mercurian group, the Germans, by another, the

Jews. The difference between the Jews and the Germans was that the Jews

had a longstanding visceral antipathy, out of past historical grievances, both

real and imagined, toward the people and culture they came to administer.

Indeed, Russians on the nationalist right admired the Germans, at least up to

World War I. For example, a statute of one nationalist organization, Michael

the Archangel Russian People’s Union, expressed “particular trust in the

German population of the Empire,”16 while its leader, Vladimir Purishkevich,

accused the Jews of “irreconcilable hatred of Russia and everything Russian.”17

Jews disliked the Christian religion of the vast majority of Russians because

70 Vol. 5, No. 3 The Occidental Quarterly

of the antagonistic relationship between Judaism and Christianity over the

ages; Jews distrusted the peasants, who “fell from grace” (p. 140) with the

intelligentsia after the numerous anti-Jewish pogroms, especially after 1880;

and Jews blamed the tsar for not doing enough to keep the peasants in check

and for imposing the various quotas on Jewish advancement that went into

place, also beginning in the 1880s—quotas that slowed down but by no means

halted Jewish overrepresentation in the universities and the professions. In

this respect, the Germans were far more like the Overseas Chinese, in that

they became an elite without having an aggressively hostile attitude toward

the people and culture they administered and dominated economically. Thus

when Jews achieved power in Russia, it was as a hostile elite with a deep

sense of historic grievance. As a result, they became willing executioners of

both the people and cultures they came to rule, including the Germans.

After the Revolution, not only were the Germans replaced, but there was

active suppression of any remnants of the older order and their descendants.

Jews have always shown a tendency to rise because their natural proclivities

(e.g., high intelligence) and powerful ethnic networking, but here they also

benefited from “antibourgeois” quotas in educational institutions and other

forms of discrimination against the middle class and aristocratic elements of

the old regime that would have provided more competition with Jews. In a

letter intercepted by the secret police, the father of a student wrote that his

son and their friends were about to be purged from the university because

of their class origins. “It is clear that only the Jerusalem academics and the

Communist Party members generally are going to stay” (p. 243). The bourgeois

elements from the previous regime, including the ethnic Germans, would have

no future. Thus the mass murder of peasants and nationalists was combined

with the systematic exclusion of the previously existing non-Jewish middle

class. The wife of a Leningrad University professor noted, “in all the institutions,

only workers and Israelites are admitted; the life of the intelligentsia is

very hard” (p. 243). Even at the end of the 1930s, prior to the Russification that

accompanied World War II, “the Russian Federation…was still doing penance

for its imperial past while also serving as an example of an ethnicity-free

society” (p. 276). While all other nationalities, including Jews, were allowed

and encouraged to keep their ethnic identities, the revolution remained an

anti-majoritarian movement.

Slezkine is aware of the biological reality of kinship and ethnicity, but he

steadfastly pursues a cultural determinist model. He argues that biological

models of ethnic nepotism are inappropriate because some nomadic groups

are not kin groups but rather “quasi-families” like the Sicilian mafia (p. 35).

But this is a distinction without a difference: Why are “natural” kinship groups

significantly different from groups composed of families that band together?

Each is characterized by internal cohesion and external strangeness, the traits

Slezkine deems essential, but there are also kinship connections and a genetic

Fall 2005 / MacDonald 71

divide between themselves and surrounding peoples. Cultural badges of group

membership and a culturally generated ideology of kin-group membership are

age-old ways of cementing kinship groups and setting up barriers that mark real

biological differences—the evolved psychology described by modern research

in social identity theory.18 And in any case, the demonstrable genetic differences

between Slezkine’s prototypical Mercurians—the Jews, Gypsies, and Overseas

Chinese—and the surrounding peoples cry out for a biological analysis.

Moreover, Slezkine underestimates the power of ethnocentrism as a unifying

factor in Jewish history. This is most apparent in his discussion of Israel, which

he describes as a radical departure from the Jewish tradition, because Israel is a

quintessentially Apollonian society. Long after Western societies had rejected

ethnic nationalism:

Israel continued to live in the European 1930s: only Israel still belonged

to the eternally young, worshiped athleticism and inarticulateness, celebrated

combat and secret police, promoted hiking and scouting, despised

doubt and introspection, embodied the seamless unity of the chosen,

and rejected most traits traditionally associated with Jewishness…. After

two thousand years of living as Mercurians among Apollonians, Jews

turned into the only Apollonians in a world of Mercurians (or rather, the

only civilized Apollonians in a world of Mercurians and barbarians)”

(pp. 327, 328).

But Israelis certainly did not reject traditional Jewish ethnocentrism and

sense of peoplehood. Slezkine portrays Israelis as simply choosing to be

ethnocentric nationalists, but ethnocentrism (like intelligence) is a biological

system, not a lifestyle choice, and traditional Diaspora Jews were certainly

deeply and intensely ethnocentric above all else.19 There can be little question

that Israel and Zionism have been and are promoted and spearheaded by the

most ethnocentric elements of the Jewish community.20

For Slezkine, as for so many Jews, the moral debt owed to Jews by Western

societies justifies the most extreme expressions of Jewish racialism: “The

rhetoric of ethnic homogeneity and ethnic deportations, tabooed elsewhere in

the West, is a routine element of Israeli political life…. It is true that no other

European nation is in a condition of permanent war; it is also true that no other

European state can have as strong a claim on the West’s moral imagination”

(pp. 364–365). Slezkine sees the moral taboo on European ethnocentrism,

the creation of Nazism as the epitome of absolute evil, and the consecration

of Jews as “the Chosen people of the postwar Western world” (p. 366) as

simply the inevitable results of the events of World War II (pp. 365–366). In

fact, however, the creation and maintenance of the culture of the Holocaust

and the special moral claims of Jews and Israel are the result of Jewish ethnic

activism. These claims have a specific historical trajectory, they are fueled by

specific key events, and they are sustained by specific forces.21 For example,

the Holocaust was not emphasized as a cultural icon until the late 1960s and

72 Vol. 5, No. 3 The Occidental Quarterly

early 1970s, when images of the Holocaust were deployed on a large scale in

popular culture by Jewish activists specifically to rally support for Israel in

the context of its wars of 1967 and 1973.

Similarly, Slezkine sees the United States as a Jewish promised land precisely

because it is not defined tribally and “has no state-bearing natives” (p. 369). But

the recasting of the United States as a “proposition nation” was importantly

influenced by the triumph of several Jewish intellectual and political movements

more than it was a natural and inevitable culmination of American history.22

These movements collectively delegitimized cultural currents of the early

twentieth century whereby many Americans thought of themselves as members

of a very successful ethnic group. For example, the immigration restrictionists

of the 1920s unabashedly asserted the right of European-derived peoples to

the land they had conquered and settled. Americans of northern European

descent in the United States thought of themselves as part of a cultural and

ethnic heritage extending backward in time to the founding of the country,

and writers like Madison Grant (The Passing of the Great Race) and Lothrop

Stoddard (The Rising Tide of Color against White World Supremacy) had a large

public following. At that time both academia and mainstream culture believed

in the reality of race; that there were important differences between the races,

including in intelligence and moral character; and that races naturally competed

for land and other resources.23

JEWISH SUPERIORITY

The assertion that Israel is the only civilized Apollonian society, despite its

acknowledged racialism and open discussion of ethnic deportations, reveals

Slezkine’s belief in Jewish moral and intellectual superiority. Indeed, Slezkine

regards both European individualism and the European nation-state as imitations

of preexisting Jewish accomplishments: “Europeans imitated Jews not

only in being modern [by becoming individualists interacting with strangers],

but also in being ancient” [i.e., by developing ethnically based nation-states] (p.

44). So we read condescending passages such as “among the most successful

[of the European Mercurians] were Max Weber’s Protestants, who discovered a

humorless, dignified way to be Jewish” (p. 41). This act of intellectual gymnastics

depends on the following analogy: Jews act as an ethnically based tribe within

societies, seeing non-Jews as strangers; Europeans establish tribal nation-states

while behaving as individualists within their societies (seeing other Europeans

as strangers). The sweeping conclusion: Jews are the progenitors therefore of

both aspects of modernity: economic individualism and the ethnically based

nation-state. The Holocaust then occurred because the European nation-state,

although an imitation of Judaism, failed somehow to be sufficiently Jewish:

“In the hands of heavily armed, thoroughly bureaucratized, and imperfectly

Judaized Apollonians, Mercurian exclusivity and fastidiousness became

relentlessly expansive. In the hands of messianically inclined Apollonians,

Fall 2005 / MacDonald 73

it turned lethal—especially to the Mercurians. The Holocaust had as much to

do with tradition as it did with modernity” (p. 46).

But it is a huge stretch to argue from an analogy—and a loose one at that—to

actual imitation and influence. (And one just doesn’t know what to say about

his claim that Europeans perpetrated the Holocaust because they had become

imperfect Jews.) Slezkine fails to provide any evidence that there is anything

but a hazy and forced logical connection between European individualism

and the Jewish role as a Diaspora people living among strangers. The reality

is that by becoming individualists, Western Europeans returned to distinctive

roots buried in their primeval past,24 whereas Judaism, because of its deepseated

tribalism, was widely regarded by Enlightenment intellectuals as an

outmoded relic. Indeed, several Jewish commentators have noted that the post-

Enlightenment forms of Judaism have essentially been responses to the corrosive

effects of European civilization, with its emphasis on individualism and ethnic

assimilation, on Judaism as an ethnically based collectivist group—what early

Zionist Arthur Ruppin described as “the destructive influence of European

civilization” on Judaism because of its tendency to break down group barriers

and lead eventually to assimilation and intermarriage.25 Moreover, as Slezkine

notes, Jews are not really individualists at all. Even in the modern world, the

tribal approach of the Jews in economic enterprises employs ethnic kinship as

a central component, whereas the individualistic approach of the Europeans

sees this as illegitimate (p. 43). The bottom line is that it is ridiculous to claim

that Jews are individualists because they treat outsiders as individuals while

acknowledging that they retain a powerful ingroup consciousness and are

masters of ethnic networking.

It is no stretch at all, however, to show that Jews have achieved a preeminent

position in Europe and America, and Slezkine provides us with statistics of Jewish

domination only dimly hinted at in the following examples from Europe in the

late nineteenth century to the rise of National Socialism. Austria: All but one bank

in fin de siècle Vienna was administered by Jews, and Jews constituted 70% of the

stock exchange council; Hungary: between 50 and 90 percent of all industry was

controlled by Jewish banking families, and 71% of the most wealthy taxpayers

were Jews; Germany: Jews were overrepresented among the economic elite by a

factor of 33. Similar massive overrepresentation was also to be found in educational

attainment and among professionals (e.g., Jews constituted 62% of the lawyers

in Vienna in 1900, 25% in Prussia in 1925, 34% in Poland, and 51% in Hungary).

Indeed, “the universities, ‘free’ professions, salons, coffeehouses, concert halls,

and art galleries in Berlin, Vienna, and Budapest became so heavily Jewish that

liberalism and Jewishness became almost indistinguishable” (p. 63).

Slezkine documents the well-known fact that, as Moritz Goldstein famously

noted in 1912, “We Jews administer the spiritual possessions of Germany.”

However, he regards Jewish cultural dominance, not only in Germany but

throughout Eastern Europe and Austria, as completely benign: “The secular

74 Vol. 5, No. 3 The Occidental Quarterly

Jews’ love of Goethe, Schiller, and the other Pushkins—as well as the various

northern forests they represented—was sincere and tender” (p. 68). Their

only sin was that their love of cultural icons transcended national and ethnic

boundaries in an age of popular nationalism—for example, their promotion

of German culture among the Czechs, Latvians, and Romanians. But this is far

from the whole story. Jews were not simply lovers of Pushkin and Goethe. A

major theme of anti-Jewish attitudes was that Jews were deeply involved in

creating a “culture of critique”—that Jewish cultural influence was entirely

negative and shattered the social bonds of the peoples they lived among.

Slezkine cites Heinrich Heine as a prime example of a Jewish intellectual with

sincere and tender love for German culture, but the Germans, from Wagner to

von Treitschke to Chamberlain and Hitler, didn’t see it that way. For example,

Heinrich von Treitschke, a prominent nineteenth-century German intellectual,

complained of Heine’s “mocking German humiliation and disgrace following

the Napoleonic wars” and Heine’s having “no sense of shame, loyalty, truthfulness,

or reverence.”26 Nor does he mention von Treitschke’s comment

that “what Jewish journalists write in mockery and satirical remarks against

Christianity is downright revolting”; “about the shortcomings of the Germans

[or] French, everybody could freely say the worst things; but if somebody dared

to speak in just and moderate terms about some undeniable weakness of the

Jewish character, he was immediately branded as a barbarian and religious

persecutor by nearly all of the newspapers.”27 Such attitudes were prominent

among anti-Jewish writers and activists, reaching a crescendo with the National

Socialists in Germany.

Yet for Slezkine, if Jews did battle against various national cultures—and in

the end, he acknowledges that they did—it was only because they realized that

their Mercurian worldview was superior: “Did they really want to transform

themselves into thick-skulled peasants now that the actual peasants had, for

all practical purposes, admitted the error of their ways?” (p. 74). Jews were

not recognized as legitimate curators of the national culture, but their lack of

acceptance means only that they are truly modern: “Deprived of the comforts

of their tribe and not allowed into the new ones created by their Apollonian

neighbors, they became the only true moderns” (p. 75)—a statement that accepts

at face value the idea that the secular Jews who had become the custodians

and main producers of culture had ceased to have a Jewish identification.

Slezkine fails to provide any evidence at all for this claim, and in fact there is

overwhelming evidence that it is false.28

The main weapons Jews used against national cultures were two quintessentially

modern ideologies, Marxism and Freudianism, “both [of which]

countered nationalism’s quaint tribalism with a modern (scientific) path to

wholeness” (p. 80). Slezkine correctly views both of these as Jewish ideologies

functioning as organized religions, with sacred texts promising deliverance

from earthly travail. While most of his book recounts the emergence of a

Fall 2005 / MacDonald 75

Jewish elite under the banner of Marxism in the Soviet Union, his comments on

psychoanalysis bear mentioning. Psychoanalysis “moved to the United States to

reinforce democratic citizenship with a much-needed new prop…. In America,

where nationwide tribal metaphors could not rely on theories of biological

descent, Freudianism came in very handy indeed” by erecting the “Explicitly

Therapeutic State” (pp. 79–80). The establishment of the Explicitly Therapeutic

State was much aided by yet another Jewish intellectual movement, the

Frankfurt School, which combined psychoanalysis and Marxism. The result was

a culture of critique which fundamentally aimed not only at de-legitimizing

the older American culture, but even attempted to alter or obliterate human

nature itself: “The statistical connection between ‘the Jewish question’ and

the hope for a new species of mankind seems fairly strong” (p. 90).

And when people don’t cooperate in becoming a new species, there’s always

murder. Slezkine describes Walter Benjamin, an icon of the Frankfurt School and

darling of the current crop of postmodern intellectuals, “with glasses on his nose,

autumn in his soul and vicarious murder in his heart” (p. 216), a comment that

illustrates the fine line between murder and cultural criticism, especially when

engaged in by ethnic outsiders. Indeed, on another occasion, Benjamin stated,

“Hatred and [the] spirit of sacrifice…are nourished by the image of enslaved

ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren.”29 Although Slezkine

downplays this aspect of Jewish motivation, Jews’ lachrymose perceptions of

their history—their images of enslaved ancestors—were potent motivators of

the hatred unleashed by the upheavals of the twentieth century.

Slezkine is entirely correct that Marxism, psychoanalysis, and the Frankfurt

School were fundamentally Jewish intellectual movements. However, he fails

to provide anything like a detailed account of how these ideologies served

specifically Jewish interests, most generally in combating anti-Semitism and

subverting ethnic identification among Europeans.30 Indeed, a major premise

of his treatment is that Jewish radicals were not Jews at all.

WERE JEWISH RADICALS JEWS?

Slezkine recounts the vast overrepresentation of Jews in the radical left in

Europe and America. His attempts to explain this cover some familiar ground:

Jewish intellectual opposition to the status quo resulting from their marginal

social status (Thorsten Veblen); Jewish leftism as a secular, universalized form

of traditional Jewish messianism and rationalism in which Jewish leftists are

descendents of the Old Testament prophets calling for social justice (Lev

Shternberg, dean of Soviet anthropologists); Jewish Communists as recreating

traditional Jewish culture forms—especially scriptural interpretation and

intense teacher-student relationships—in a Communist setting (historian Jaff

Schatz). Slezkine’s own contribution is to argue that Jewish radicals were

in revolt against their families, “rejecting the world of their fathers because

it seemed to embody the connection between Judaism and antisocialism

76 Vol. 5, No. 3 The Occidental Quarterly

(understood as commercialism, tribalism, and patriarchy)…the real reason

for their common revulsion was the feeling that capitalism and Jewishness

were one and the same thing”%'28pp. 96, 98). “Most Jewish rebels did not fight

the state in order to become free Jews; they fought the state in order to become

free of Jewishness—and thus Free” (p. 152).

This is a very useful theory, of course—useful because it denies that Jewish

radicals were Jews at all, that in fact they were anti-Jews (if not anti-Semites—and

there’s the rub). When Slezkine then goes on to recount the Jewish role as an

elite in the most murderous regime in European history, we are led to believe

that the only connection of those Jews with Jewishness is genealogical: Russian

Jewish radicals, lovers of Pushkin and Tolstoy (as their counterparts in Poland,

Hungary, and Germany loved Adam Mickiewicz, Sandór Petőfi, and Goethe),

idealistically and selflessly set out to fashion a secular utopia of social justice

by overcoming Apollonian backwardness even as they rejected their Jewish

origins and all things Jewish.

His evidence for this is rather thin, but even in the examples Slezkine uses

to illustrate his point it is clear that these Jewish radicals hated everything

about their national cultures except for one or two literary figures. The rest

would have to go. As Exhibit A, Slezkine presents Georg Lukács, the son of a

prominent Jewish capitalist, who describes his profound discontent with his

father’s way of life. But Lukács also expresses his hatred for “the whole of official

Hungary”—how he extended his unhappiness with his father to “cover the

whole of Magyar life, Magyar history, and Magyar literature indiscriminately

(save for Petőfi)” (p. 97). Ah, yes. Save for Petőfi. All else—the people and the

culture—would have to go, by mass murder if necessary. (Lazar Kaganovich,

the most prolific Jewish mass murderer of the Stalinist era, is pictured at

the end of his life reading Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Turgenev [pp. 97–98].) But

rather than see this as an aspect of traditional Jewish hatred for non-Jews and

their culture, souped up and rationalized with a veneer of Marxism, Slezkine

explains these radicals as enlightened Mercurians who wished to destroy the

old culture except for a few classics of modern literature. We may give thanks

to know that Shakespeare would have survived the revolution.

Another of Slezkine’s examples is Lev Kopelev, a Soviet writer who

witnessed and rationalized the Ukrainian famine as “historical necessity” (p.

230). Slezkine states categorically that Kopelev did not identify as a Jew, but

his own material indicates the complexity of the matter. Kopelev identified

himself on Soviet documents as “Jewish” but claimed that was only because

he did not want to be seen as a “‘cowardly apostate,’ and—after World War

II—because he did not want to renounce those who had been murdered for

being Jewish” (p. 241). To the external world, Kopelev is a proud Jew, but to

his close associates—in his “heart of hearts”— he is only a Communist and

Soviet patriot. But of course many of his close associates were ethnic Jews, and

he shed no tears for the Ukrainian and Russian peasants and nationalists who

Fall 2005 / MacDonald 77

were murdered in the name of international socialism even as he mourned

the loss of Jews murdered because they were Jews. By World War II he had

become a “leading ideologue of Russian patriotism” (p. 279), developing “an

acute sense of hurt and injustice on behalf of Russia, Russian history, and the

Russian word” (p. 280) as he attempted to rally the Russians to do battle with the

Germans. Russian patriotism had suddenly become useful—much as, I would

argue, harnessing the patriotism and high regard for military service among

Americans has been useful for Jewish neoconservatives eager to rearrange the

politics of the Middle East in the interests of Israel. Ideology is a wonderfully

effective instrument in the service of self-deception (or deception).

Probably more typical of the Jewish identity of the Bolsheviks is the account

of Vitaly Rubin, a prominent philosopher and an ethnic Jew, who recounted

his career at a top Moscow school in the 1930s where over half the students

were Jewish:

Understandably, the Jewish question did not arise there. Not only did

it not arise in the form of anti-Semitism, it did not arise at all. All the

Jews knew themselves to be Jews but considered everything to do with

Jewishness a thing of the past. I remember thinking of my father’s stories

about his childhood, heder [Jewish elementary school], and traditional

Jewish upbringing as something consigned to oblivion. None of that had

anything to do with me. There was no active desire to renounce one’s

Jewishness. The problem simply did not exist (pp. 253–254).

These Jews clearly have a Jewish identity but they have been removed from

traditional Jewish religious cultural forms. In such a predominantly Jewish

milieu, there was no need to renounce their Jewish identity and no need to

push aggressively for Jewish interests because they had achieved elite status.

And yet, just prior to World War II, as Russians started replacing Jews among

the political elite and Nazism emerged as an officially anti-Jewish ideology,

overt Jewish identity reemerged. Following World War II, Israel began exerting

its gravitational pull on Jews, much to the chagrin of a suspicious Stalin. The

visit of Golda Meir in 1948 and the outpouring of Jewish support for Zionism

that it aroused was a watershed event for Soviet Jewry. Stalin reacted to it by

initiating a campaign against public Jews and Yiddish culture.

It is interesting in this regard that the leading Soviet spokesmen on anti-

Semitism were both ethnic Jews with non-Jewish sounding names, Emilian

Yaroslavsky (Gubelman) and Yuri Larin (Lurie). Both refer to Jews in the third

person (p. 245), as if they themselves were not Jews. But when Larin tried to

explain the embarrassing fact that Jews were “preeminent, overabundant,

dominant, and so on” (p. 251) among the elite in the Soviet Union, he mentioned

the “unusually strong sense of solidarity and a predisposition toward mutual

help and support” (p. 252)—ethnic networking by any other name.

Obviously, “mutual help and support” require that Jews recognize each

other as Jews. Jewish identity may not have been much discussed, but it operated

nonetheless, even if subconsciously, in the rarefied circles at the top of Soviet

78 Vol. 5, No. 3 The Occidental Quarterly

society. An example not presented by Slezkine is recounted in a report of 1950 to

the central committee on Jewish activities at an aircraft production facility:

In a number of extremely important departments of the Central Aero-

Hydrodynamic Institute there are workers due to be substituted for

political reasons. They gather around themselves people of the same

nationality, impose the habit of praising one another (while making

others erroneously believe that they are indispensable), and force their

protégés through to high posts.31

Indeed, there is no other way to explain the extraordinary percentages of

Jews throughout elite institutions, which became apparent when the purges

began in the late 1940s (see below). High IQ and achievement motivation

can only go so far, and cannot explain why, for example, in the late 1940s

Jews made up 80% of the Soviet Academy of Science Institute of Literature

(Pushkin House) (p. 302), 42% of the directors of Moscow theaters, over half of

Soviet circus directors (p. 301), or eight of the top ten directors of the Bolshoi

Theater.32 In the case of Pushkin House, the opponents of the dominant clique

stated that it had been forged “by long-lasting relationships of families and

friends, mutual protection, homogeneous (Jewish) national composition, and

anti-patriotic (anti-Russian) tendencies.”33

The reality is that Jewish identity always becomes more salient when

Jews feel threatened or feel that their interests as Jews are at stake, but Jewish

identity becomes submerged when Jewish interests coincide with other interests

and identities.34 (This is a human universal and presumably accounts for the

fact that the American Founding Fathers felt no need to carefully define the

cultural and ethnic parameters of their creation; they assumed the racial and

cultural homogeneity of the Republic35 and perceived no threat to its control

by themselves and their descendants.) The relative submergence of Jewish

identity within the Jewish milieu in elite circles of the Soviet Union during the

1920s and 1930s is a poor indicator of whether or not these people identified

as Jews or would do so when in later years Jewish and Soviet identities began

to diverge, when National Socialism reemphasized Jewish identity, or when

Israel emerged as a beacon for Jewish identity and loyalty. A similar stance

may be observed among present-day Jewish neoconservatives, who argue that

the United States has a deep interest in democratizing the Middle East. The

confluence of their interests as Jews in promoting the policies of the Israeli right

wing and their construction of American interests allows them to submerge

or even deny the relevance of their Jewish identity while posing as American

patriots.36 But if Israeli and American policy began to diverge significantly,

Jewish interests would almost certainly control their attitudes and behavior.

Indeed, since neoconservative Zionism of the Likud Party variety is well known

for promoting a confrontation between the U.S. and the entire Muslim world,

their policy recommendations best fit a pattern of loyalty to their ethnic group,

not to America.37

Fall 2005 / MacDonald 79

In a previous work I advanced several reasons for supposing that Jews

continued to identify as Jews in the USSR, none of which is challenged by

Slezkine’s treatment: (1) Persons were classified as Jews depending on their

ethnic background, at least partly because of residual anti-Jewish attitudes;

this would tend to impose a Jewish identity on these individuals and make it

difficult to assume an exclusive identity as a member of a larger, more inclusive

political group. (2) Many Jewish Bolsheviks, such as those in Evsektsiya (the

Jewish section of the Communist Party) and the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee,

aggressively sought to establish a secular Jewish subculture; these phenomena

are virtually ignored by Slezkine. (3) Very few Jews on the left envisioned a

postrevolutionary society without a continuation of Judaism as a group; indeed,

the predominant ideology among Jewish leftists was that postrevolutionary

society would end anti-Semitism because it would end class conflict and the

peculiar Jewish occupational profile. (4) The behavior of American Communists

shows that Jewish identity and the primacy of Jewish interests over Communist

interests were commonplace among individuals who were ethnically Jewish

Communists. (5) The existence of Jewish crypsis in other times and places was

combined with the possibility that self-deception, identificatory flexibility, and

identificatory ambivalence are important components of Judaism as a group

evolutionary strategy.38

And in the end, despite the rationalizations of many Soviet Jews and

Slezkine on Jewish identity, it was blood that mattered. By the time of World

War II, most Jews

knew that they were, in some sense, Jews. They may never have been to

a synagogue, seen a menorah, heard Yiddish or Hebrew, tasted gefilte

fish or indeed met their grandparents. But they knew they were Jews

in the Soviet sense, which was also—in essence—the Nazi sense. They

were Jews by blood (p. 286).

They reemerged as Jews to fight the Nazis and to solicit the support of

American Jews to pressure their government to enter the war and provide

aid to the Soviet Union. Jewish spokesmen visited New York proclaiming that

“the Jewish people—‘ethnic’ or religious, Communist, Zionist, or traditionalist—

were one family” (p. 290).

Moreover, Slezkine leaves out an enormous amount of evidence that conflicts

with his Jewish radicalism-as-patricide thesis, evidence indicating that in general

Jewish radicals did identify as Jews and acted to promote specific Jewish interests.

Certainly Jewish radicals often rejected their fathers’ religion and their way of

life, but all the evidence points to their identifying in different ways as Jews,

not losing their Jewish identity to become de-ethnicized moral crusaders against

capitalism. Slezkine uses Franz Boas to illustrate his patricide theory, because

Boas was a radical Jew who recognized “the shackles of tradition” (p. 98). But

he fails to note that Boas was hardly in rebellion against his own family. Boas

was reared in a “Jewish-liberal” family in which the revolutionary ideals of

80 Vol. 5, No. 3 The Occidental Quarterly

1848 remained influential,39 and there is ample evidence of his strong Jewish

identification and concern with anti-Semitism.40

Besides a few individual cases like Lukács and Boas, the only general

evidence that Slezkine provides for the patricide thesis comes from Jaff

Schatz’s study of the generation of Jewish Communists who dominated the

Communist movement in Poland beginning in the 1930s. But he provides a

mangled account of Schatz’s work.41 These Jews did indeed reject their parents’

religion, but the result of their Yiddish upbringing was “a deep core of their

identity, values, norms, and attitudes with which they entered the rebellious

period of their youth and adulthood. This core was to be transformed in the

processes of acculturation, secularization, and radicalization sometimes even

to the point of explicit denial. However, it was through this deep layer that

all later perceptions were filtered.”42 Most of these individuals spoke Yiddish

in their daily lives and had only a poor command of Polish even after joining the

party. They socialized entirely with other Jews whom they met in the Jewish

world of work, neighborhood, and Jewish social and political organizations.

After they became Communists, they dated and married among themselves,

and their social gatherings were conducted in Yiddish. Their mentors and

principal influences were other ethnic Jews, including especially Luxemburg

and Trotsky, and when they recalled personal heroes, they were mostly

Jews whose exploits achieved semimythical proportions.

In general, Jews who joined the Communist movement did not first reject

their ethnic identity, and there were many who “cherished Jewish culture…[and]

dreamed of a society in which Jews would be equal as Jews.”43 It was common

for individuals to combine a strong Jewish identity with Marxism as well

as various combinations of Zionism and Bundism (a movement of Jewish

socialists). Moreover, the attraction of Polish Jews to Communism was greatly

facilitated by their knowledge that Jews had attained high-level positions of

power and influence in the Soviet Union and that the Soviet government had

established a system of Jewish education and culture. In both the Soviet Union

and Poland, Communism was seen as opposing anti-Semitism. In marked

contrast, during the 1930s the Polish government enacted policies which

excluded Jews from public-sector employment, established quotas on Jewish

representation in universities and the professions, and organized boycotts of

Jewish businesses and artisans.44 Clearly, Jews perceived Communism as good

for Jews, and indeed a major contribution of Slezkine’s book is to document

that Communism was good for Jews: It was a movement that never threatened

Jewish group continuity, and it held the promise of Jewish power and influence

and the end of state-sponsored anti-Semitism. And when this group achieved

power in Poland after World War II, they liquidated the Polish nationalist

movement, outlawed anti-Semitism, and established Jewish cultural and

economic institutions.

Fall 2005 / MacDonald 81

Slezkine also fails to note that in the United States a strong Jewish identification

was typical of Jewish radicals and that Jewish support for the left typically waxed

and waned depending on specifically Jewish issues, particularly those related to

anti-Semitism and support for Israel.45 The Jewish Old Left was a recognized

part of the Jewish community, and American Jewish leftists during the 1960s

were the only leftists who didn’t reject their parents—they really were “red

diaper babies.”

It is also remarkable that the revolutionary movement in tsarist Russia

ceased being anti-Jewish when Jews attained highly visible and prominent

positions in the movement, even though workers and peasants participated

in anti-Jewish pogroms from 1880 to 1905 and continued to harbor anti-Jewish

attitudes. As Slezkine himself notes, Jews were the only group that was not

criticized by the revolutionary movement (p. 157), even though most Russians,

and especially the lower classes whose cause they were supposedly championing,

had very negative attitudes toward Jews.46 When, in 1915, Maxim Gorky,

a strong philosemite, published a survey of Russian attitudes toward Jews,

the most common response was typified by the comment that “the congenital,

cruel, and consistent egoism of the Jews is everywhere victorious over the

good-natured, uncultured, trusting Russian peasant or merchant” (p. 159).

There were concerns that all of Russia would pass into Jewish hands and that

Russians would become slaves of the Jews. In the end, as Slezkine shows, as

a result of the Revolution this prediction was not far off the mark. But in any

case, one would think that if radical Jews had ceased being Jews, they would

have been severely critical of the Jewish role in the pre-Soviet economy.

The other huge lacuna in Slezkine’s presentation is that he portrays Jewish

radicals as typically the offspring of successful Jewish capitalists—like Georg

Lukács—who scorn their fathers and wish for nothing more than to destroy

Judaism in order to achieve personal freedom and make the world safe for

humanity: “Marxism attributed [Jewish patricide] to the proletariat and

urged the killing (more or less metaphorical) of the bad fathers, so as to

emancipate the world from Judaism and make sure that no sons would

have to kill their fathers ever again” (p. 100). Because he wishes to portray

Jews as quintessentially modern Mercurians, Slezkine repeatedly shows

how Jews dominated the economy, the universities, and the culture of

Eastern Europe—indeed, his book is probably the best, most up-to-date

account of Jewish economic and cultural preeminence in Europe (and

America) that we have. But that is far from the whole story. A prime force

resulting in Jewish radicalism was the grinding poverty of most Jews in Eastern

Europe. Jews had overshot their economic niche: The economy was unable to

support the burgeoning Jewish population in the sorts of positions that Jews

had traditionally filled, with the result that a large percentage of the Jewish

population became mired in poverty (along with much higher percentages of

the non-Jewish population). The result was a cauldron of ethnic hostility, with

82 Vol. 5, No. 3 The Occidental Quarterly

governmental restrictions on Jewish economic activity and representation in

educational institutions, rampant anti-Jewish attitudes, and increasing Jewish

desperation.47

The main Jewish response to this situation was an upsurge of fundamentalist

extremism that coalesced in the Hasidic movement and, later in the nineteenth

century, in political radicalism and Zionism as solutions to Jewish problems.

Slezkine devotes one line to the fact that Jewish populations in Eastern Europe had

the highest rate of natural increase of any European population in the nineteenth

century (p. 115), but this was an extremely important part of Eastern Europe’s

“Jewish problem.” Anti-Semitism and the exploding Jewish population, combined

with economic adversity, were of critical importance for producing the great

numbers of disaffected Jews who dreamed of deliverance in various messianic

movements—the ethnocentric mysticism of the Kabbala and Hasidism, Zionism,

or the dream of a Marxist political revolution. Jews emigrated in droves from

Eastern Europe but the problems remained. And in the case of the Marxists, the

main deliverance was to be achieved not by killing Judaism, as Slezkine suggests,

but by the destruction of the traditional societies of Eastern Europe as a panacea

for Jewish poverty and for anti-Semitism.

In fact, the vast majority of Jews in Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth

and early twentieth centuries were hardly the modern Mercurians that Slezkine

portrays them as being. Slezkine does note that well into the twentieth century

the vast majority of Eastern European Jews could not speak the languages of the

non-Jews living around them, and he does a good job of showing their intense

ingroup feeling and their attitudes that non-Jews were less than human.48 But

he ignores their medieval outlook on life, their obsession with the Kabbala (the

writings of Jewish mystics), their superstition and anti-rationalism, and their

belief in “magical remedies, amulets, exorcisms, demonic possession (dybbuks),

ghosts, devils, and teasing, mischievous genies.”49 These supposedly modern

Mercurians had an attitude of absolute faith in the person of the tsadik, their rebbe,

who was a charismatic figure seen by his followers literally as the personification

of God in the world. (Attraction to charismatic leaders is a fundamental feature of

Jewish social organization—apparent as much among religious fundamentalists

as among Jewish political radicals or elite Jewish intellectuals.)50

BOLSHEVISM AS A JEWISH REVOLUTION

Slezkine’s main contribution is to summarize previously available data

and to extend our understanding of Jewish dominance of the revolutionary

movements before 1917, and of Soviet society thereafter. (Oddly, he makes

only a passing reference to Albert Lindemann’s important Esau’s Tears, which

makes many of the same points.) Not only were Jews vastly overrepresented

among revolutionaries, they “were particularly well represented at the top,

among theoreticians, journalists, and leaders” (p. 155). Radical Jews, like other

Fall 2005 / MacDonald 83

Jews, were very talented, highly intelligent, hardworking, and in addition

dedicated to creating effective ethnic networks.51 These traits propelled them

to the top of radical organizations and made the organizations themselves

more effective.

But if Jews dominated radical and revolutionary organizations, they were

immeasurably aided by philosemites like Gorky who, in Albert Lindemann’s

term, were “jewified non-Jews”—“a term, freed of its ugly connotations,

[that] might be used to underline an often overlooked point: Even in Russia

there were some non-Jews, whether Bolsheviks or not, who respected Jews,

praised them abundantly, imitated them, cared about their welfare, and

established intimate friendships or romantic liaisons with them.”52 (As noted

above, many of the non-Jewish elite in the USSR had Jewish wives.) What

united the Jews and philosemites was their hatred for what Lenin (who had

a Jewish grandfather) called “the thick-skulled, boorish, inert, and bearishly

savage Russian or Ukrainian peasant”—the same peasant Gorky described as

“savage, somnolent, and glued to his pile of manure” (p. 163). It was attitudes

like these that created the climate that justified the slaughter of many millions

of peasants under the new regime. Philosemites continued to be common

among the non-Jewish elite in the USSR, even in the 1950s, when Jews began

to be targeted as Jews. One such philosemite was Pavel Sudoplatov, a Slav

married to a Jew and with many Jewish friends, who was a high-ranking

secret police official with a great deal of blood on his hands. The only murder

he unequivocally condemned in his memoirs was that of Paul Mikhoels, a

Jewish ethnic activist associated with the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee.

Figures like Gorky and Sudoplatov were critical to the success of Jews

in the Soviet Union. This is a general principle of Jewish political activity in

a Diaspora situation: Because Jews tend to constitute a tiny percentage of a

society, they need to make alliances with non-Jews whose perceived interests

dovetail with theirs. Non-Jews have a variety of reasons for being associated

with Jewish interests, including career advancement, close personal relationships

or admiration for individual Jews, and deeply held personal convictions.53

Gorky’s love for the Jews—what Slezkine terms “the bitter, ardent, and

hopeless love of self-described Apollonians for beautiful Mercurians” (p.

165)—was boundless. Gorky saw Jews as possessors of “heroic” idealism,

“all-probing, all-scrutinizing”; “this idealism, which expresses itself in their

tireless striving to remake the world according to new principles of equality

and justice, is the main, and possibly the only, reason for the hostility toward

Jews” (quoted on p. 164).

Despite the important role of Jews among the Bolsheviks, most Jews were

not Bolsheviks before the revolution. However, Jews were prominent among the

Bolsheviks, and once the revolution was under way, the vast majority of Russian

Jews became sympathizers and active participants. Jews were particularly

visible in the cities and as leaders in the army and in the revolutionary councils

84 Vol. 5, No. 3 The Occidental Quarterly

and committees. For example, there were 23 Jews among the 62 Bolsheviks in

the All-Russian Central Executive Committee elected at the Second Congress

of Soviets in October, 1917. Jews were the leaders of the movement, and to a

great extent they were its public face. Slezkine quotes historian Mikhail Beizer

who notes, commenting on the situation in Leningrad, that “Jewish names

were constantly popping up in newspapers. Jews spoke relatively more often

than others at rallies, conferences, and meetings of all kinds.”54 In general, Jews

were deployed in supervisory positions rather than positions that placed them

in physical danger. In a Politburo meeting of April 18, 1919, Trotsky urged

that Jews be redeployed because there were relatively few Jews in frontline

combat units, while Jews constituted a “vast percentage” of the Cheka at the

front and in the Executive Committees at the front and at the rear. This pattern

had caused “chauvinist agitation” in the Red Army (p. 187).

Jewish representation at the top levels of the Cheka and OGPU (the acronyms

by which the secret police was known in different periods) has often been the

focus of those stressing Jewish involvement in the revolution and its aftermath.

Slezkine provides statistics on Jewish overrepresentation in these organizations,

especially in supervisory roles, and agrees with Leonard Schapiro’s comment

that “anyone who had the misfortune to fall into the hands of the Cheka stood

a very good chance of finding himself confronted with and possibly shot by a

Jewish investigator” (p. 177). During the 1930s the secret police, then known

as the NKVD, “was one of the most Jewish of all Soviet institutions” (p. 254),

with 42 of its 111 top officials being Jewish. At this time 12 of the 20 NKVD

directorates were headed by ethnic Jews, including those in charge of state

security, police, labor camps, and resettlement (i.e., deportation). The Gulag

was headed by ethnic Jews from its beginning in 1930 until the end of 1938, a

period that encompasses the worst excesses of the Great Terror. They were,

in Slezkine’s words, “Stalin’s willing executioners” (p. 103).

The Bolsheviks continued to apologize for Jewish overrepresentation

until the topic became taboo in the 1930s. And it was not until the late 1930s

that there was a rise in visibility and assertiveness of “anti-Semites, ethnic

nationalists, and advocates of proportional representation” (p. 188). By this

time the worst of the slaughters in the Gulag, the purges, and the contrived

famines had been completed.

The prominence of Jews in the Revolution and its aftermath was not lost

on participants on both sides, including influential figures such as Winston

Churchill, who wrote that the role of Jews in the revolution “is certainly a

very great one; it probably outweighs all others.”55 Slezkine highlights similar

comments in a book published in 1927 by V. V. Shulgin, a Russian nationalist,

who experienced firsthand the murderous acts of the Bolsheviks in his native

Kiev in 1919: “We do not like the fact that this whole terrible thing was done

on the Russian back and that it has cost us unutterable losses. We do not like the

fact that you, Jews, a relatively small group within the Russian population,

Fall 2005 / MacDonald 85

participated in this vile deed out of all proportion to your numbers” (p. 181; italics in

original). Slezkine does not disagree with this assessment, but argues that Jews

were hardly the only revolutionaries (p. 180). This is certainly true, but does

not affect my argument that Jewish involvement was a necessary condition, not

merely a sufficient condition, for the success of the Bolshevik Revolution and its

aftermath.56 Slezkine’s argument clearly supports the Jews-as-necessary-condition

claim, especially because of his emphasis on the leadership role of Jews.

However, the claim that Jewish involvement was a necessary condition

is itself an understatement because, as Shulgin noted, the effectiveness of

Jewish revolutionaries was far out of proportion to the number of Jews. A

claim that a group constituting a large proportion of the population was

necessary to the success of a movement would be unexceptional. But the

critical importance of Jews occurred even though Jews constituted less

than 5% of the Russian population around the time of the Revolution, and

they were much less represented in the major urban areas of Moscow and

Leningrad prior to the Revolution because they were prevented from living

there by the Pale of Settlement laws.57 Slezkine is correct that Jews were not

the only revolutionaries, but his point only underscores the importance of

philosemitism and other alliances Jews typically must make in Diaspora

situations in order to advance their perceived interests.

In 1923, several Jewish intellectuals published a collection of essays admitting

the “bitter sin” of Jewish complicity in the crimes of the Revolution. In the words

of a contributor, I. L. Bikerman, “it goes without saying that not all Jews are

Bolsheviks and not all Bolsheviks are Jews, but what is equally obvious is that

disproportionate and immeasurably fervent Jewish participation in the torment

of half-dead Russia by the Bolsheviks” (p. 183). Many of the commentators on

Jewish Bolsheviks noted the “transformation” of Jews: In the words of another

Jewish commentator, G. A. Landau, “cruelty, sadism, and violence had seemed

alien to a nation so far removed from physical activity.” And another Jewish

commentator, Ia. A Bromberg, noted that:

the formerly oppressed lover of liberty had turned into a tyrant of

“unheard-of-despotic arbitrariness”…. The convinced and unconditional

opponent of the death penalty not just for political crimes but for the

most heinous offenses, who could not, as it were, watch a chicken being

killed, has been transformed outwardly into a leather-clad person with

a revolver and, in fact, lost all human likeness (pp. 183–184).

This psychological “transformation” of Russian Jews was probably not

all that surprising to the Russians themselves, given Gorky’s finding that

Russians prior to the Revolution saw Jews as possessed of “cruel egoism”

and that they were concerned about becoming slaves of the Jews. Gorky

himself remained a philosemite to the end, despite the prominent Jewish role

in the murder of approximately twenty million of his ethnic kin, 58 but after

the Revolution he commented that “the reason for the current anti-Semitism

86 Vol. 5, No. 3 The Occidental Quarterly

in Russia is the tactlessness of the Jewish Bolsheviks. The Jewish Bolsheviks, not

all of them but some irresponsible boys, are taking part in the defiling of

the holy sites of the Russian people. They have turned churches into movie

theaters and reading rooms without considering the feelings of the Russian

people.” However, Gorky did not blame the Jews for this: “The fact that the

Bolsheviks sent the Jews, the helpless and irresponsible Jewish youths, to do

these things, does smack of provocation, of course. But the Jews should have

refrained” (p. 186).

Those who carried out the mass murder and dispossession of the Russian

peasants saw themselves, at least in their public pronouncements, as doing

what was necessary in pursuit of the greater good. This was the official view

not only of the Soviet Union, where Jews formed a dominant elite, but also was

the “more or less official view” among Jewish intellectuals in the United States

(p. 215) and elsewhere. (It is still far more common for leftist intellectuals to

bemoan McCarthyism than the horrors of the USSR.59)

It is for the sake of creating a perfect human being—Apollonian in body

and Mercurian in mind—that Levinson steels himself for doing what is

“necessary,” including the requisitioning of a weeping farmer’s last pig

and the killing of a wounded comrade too weak to be evacuated…. [T]he

greater the personal responsibility for acts ordinarily considered evil, the

more visible the signs of election and the inner strength they bespoke.

Demonic as well as Promethean, Bolshevik commissars ‘carried within

them’ the pain of historical necessity” (p. 194).

Levinson, a character in A. Fedeev’s The Rout (1926), a prominent example of

socialist realism in the early Soviet period, is not ideologically Jewish, “but there

is little doubt that for reasons of both aesthetic and sociological verisimilitude,

canonical Jewishness seemed an appropriate expression of the Bolshevik vision

of disembodied consciousness triumphing over [peasant] inertia” (p. 193). So it

is not surprising that Gorky’s mild rebuke of Jewish anti-Christian zealotry was

too much for Esther Frumkina, a leader of the Party’s Jewish section. Frumkina

accused Gorky of attacking “Jewish Communists for their selfless struggle against

darkness and fanaticism” (p. 187). In their self-perceptions, Jews are selflessly

altruistic even when acting out ancient hatreds.

THE THREE GREAT JEWISH MIGRATIONS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

Slezkine’s last and longest chapter describes the three great Jewish

migrations of the twentieth century—to Israel, to America, and to the urban

centers of the Soviet Union. Slezkine perceives all three through the lens of

heroic Jewish self-perception. He sees the United States as a Jewish utopia

precisely because it had only a “vestigial establishment tribalism” (p. 209)

that could not long inhibit Jewish ascendancy: “The United States stood for

unabashed Mercurianism, nontribal statehood, and the supreme sovereignty

of capitalism and professionalism. It was—rhetorically—a collection if homines

Fall 2005 / MacDonald 87

rationalistici artificiales, a nation of strangers held together by a common celebration

of separateness (individualism) and rootlessness (immigration)” (p. 207). It

was the only modern state…in which a Jew could be an equal citizen and a

Jew at the same time. ‘America’ offered full membership without complete

assimilation. Indeed, it seemed to require an affiliation with a subnational

community as a condition of full membership in the political nation” (p.

207).

Slezkine sees post-World War II America as a Jewish utopia but seems

only dimly aware that Jews to a great extent created their own utopia in the

U.S. by undermining nativist sentiments that were common at least until after

World War II. Slezkine emphasizes the Jewish role in institutionalizing the

therapeutic state, but sees it as completely benign, rather than an aspect of the

“culture of critique” that undermined the ethnic identities of white Americans:

“By bringing Freudianism to America and by adopting it, briefly, as a salvation

religion, [Jews] made themselves more American while making America more

therapeutic” (p. 319). There is little discussion of the main anti-nativist intellectual

movements, all of which were dominated by ethnically conscious Jews:

Boasian anthropology, Horace Kallen and the development of the theory of

America as a “proposition nation,” and the Frankfurt School which combined

psychoanalysis and Marxism into a devastating weapon against the ethnic

consciousness of white Americans. Nor does he discuss the role of Jewish

activist organizations in altering the ethnic balance of the United States by

promoting large-scale immigration from around the world.

Slezkine also views the Jewish migration to Israel as heroic: “In both

Jewish Palestine (the Yishuv) and Soviet Russia, brotherhood stood for the

full identity of all true believers (always the few against the many) and their

complete identification with the cause (ardently desired and genuinely felt

by most young Jews in both places). Eventually, both revolutions evolved

in the direction of greater hierarchy, institutionalized militarism, intense

anxiety about aliens, and the cult of generals, boy soldiers, and elite forces,

but between 1917 and the mid-1930s they were overflowing with youthful

energy and the spirit of fraternal effort, and self-sacrifice” (p. 212).

The passage is remarkable both for its pinpointing the ingroup/outgroup

nature of the psychology of traditional Jewish groups, freed now of the Torah

and the synagogue, and for its description of the ingroup psychology of mass

murder (in the USSR) and ethnic cleansing (in the Middle East) as involving

valiant self-sacrifice and pride in accomplishment.

But Slezkine spends most of his energy by far in providing 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. In all

cases, Jewish overrepresentation was most apparent at the pinnacles of success

and influence. To take just the area of culture, Jews were highly visible as

avant-garde artists, formalist theorists, polemicists, moviemakers, and poets.

88 Vol. 5, No. 3 The Occidental Quarterly

They were “among the most exuberant crusaders against ‘bourgeois’ habits

during the Great Transformation; the most disciplined advocates of socialist

realism during the ‘Great Retreat’ (from revolutionary internationalism); and

the most passionate prophets of faith, hope, and combat during the Great

Patriotic War against the Nazis” (p. 225). And, as their critics noticed, Jews were

involved in anti-Christian propaganda. Mikhail Bulgakov, a Russian writer,

noticed that the publishers of Godless magazine were Jews; he was “stunned”

to find that Christ was portrayed as “a scoundrel and a cheat. It is not hard to

see whose work it is. This crime is immeasurable” (p. 244).

Some of the juxtapositions are striking and seemingly intentional. On p. 230,

Lev Kopelev is quoted on the need for firmness in confiscating the property of

the Ukrainian peasants. Kopelev, who witnessed the famine that killed seven

to ten million peasants, stated, “You mustn’t give in to debilitating pity. We are

the agents of historical necessity. We are fulfilling our revolutionary duty. We

are procuring grain for our socialist Fatherland. For the Five-Year Plan.” On

the next page, Slezkine describes the life of the largely Jewish elite in Moscow

and Leningrad, where they attended the theater, sent their children to the best

schools, had peasant women for nannies, spent weekends at pleasant dachas,

and vacationed at the Black Sea.

Slezkine describes the NKVD as “one of the most Jewish of all Soviet

institutions” and recounts the Jewish leadership of the Great Terror of the

1930s (pp. 254 and 255). On p. 256, he writes that in 1937 the prototypical Jew

who moved from the Pale of Settlement to Moscow to man elite positions

in the Soviet state “probably would have been living in elite housing in

downtown Moscow…with access to special stores, a house in the country

(dacha), and a live-in peasant nanny or maid.…At least once a year, she would

have traveled to a Black Sea sanatorium or a mineral spa in the Caucasus”

(p. 256). Slezkine writes long and lovingly detailed sketches of life at the

dachas of the elite—the “open verandas overlooking small gardens enclosed

by picket fences or wildly overgrown yards” (p. 256), but the reader is left

to his own imagination to visualize the horrors of the Ukrainian famine and

the liquidation of the Kulaks.

As Slezkine notes, most of the Soviet elite were not Jews, but Jews were

far overrepresented among the elite (and Russians far underrepresented as a

percentage of the population). Moreover, the Jews formed a far more cohesive

core than the rest of the elite because of their common social and cultural

background (p. 236). The common understanding that the new elite had a very

large Jewish representation resulted in pervasive anti-Jewish attitudes. In 1926,

an Agitprop report noted “The sense that the Soviet regime patronizes the Jews,

that it is ‘the Jewish government,’ that the Jews cause unemployment, housing

shortages, college admissions problems, price rises, and commercial speculation—

this sense is instilled in the workers by all the hostile elements.… If it does

not encounter resistance, the wave of anti-Semitism threatens to become, in the

Fall 2005 / MacDonald 89

very near future, a serious political question” (p. 244). Such widespread public

perceptions about the role of Jews in the new government led to aggressive

surveillance and repression of anti-Jewish attitudes and behavior, including

the execution of Russian nationalists who expressed anti-Jewish attitudes.

These public perceptions also motivated Jews to adopt a lower profile in the

regime, as with Trotsky, who refused the post of commissar of internal affairs

because it might lend further ammunition to the anti-Jewish arguments. From

1927 to 1932 Stalin established an ambitious public campaign to combat anti-

Semitism that included fifty-six books published by the government and an

onslaught of speeches, mass rallies, newspaper articles, and show trials “aimed

at eradicating the evil” (p. 249).

THE DECLINE OF THE JEWS IN THE SOVIET UNION

Jews were able to maintain themselves as an elite until the end of the

Soviet regime in 1991—this despite an official push for affirmative action–style

programs to open up opportunities for the children of peasants and workers

in the 1930s and to blunt the anti-Jewish feelings simmering at the lower levels

of Soviet society. Jewish elite status persisted despite the Great Terror of the

late 1930s, which disproportionately affected the political elite. On the whole,

Jews were underrepresented as victims of the Great Terror. And although the

Jewish percentage of the political elite did decline after the purges of the late

1930s and the promotion of former peasants and working class Russians, this

did not affect Jewish predominance as a professional, cultural, and managerial

elite. Jews also retained their elite status despite Stalin’s campaign in the late

1940s against Jewish ethnic and cultural institutions and their spokesmen.

Jewish elite status remained even after the purge was expanded to all

sectors of the Soviet elite, due at least partly to “the widespread sense [among

Russians] that the great victory [in World War II] entitled them to a greater

role in decision making” (p. 306). Slezkine shows the very high percentages

of Jews in various institutions in the late 1940s, including the universities, the

media, the foreign service, and the secret police. For example, the deans of

philosophers, historians, and legal scholars were ethnic Jews, and, as already

noted, Jews constituted 80% of the Soviet Academy of Science Institute of

Literature. As for the Jewish role as “vanguard of the working class,” Jews

still made up 23% of the staff at the Trade Union Council’s publication Trud

even after a purge that cut their numbers in half.

The campaign against the Jews began only after the apogee of mass murder

and deportations in the USSR, and was much less lethal than those mounted

against a long list of other ethnic groups, whose typical fate was deportation

under the most brutal of circumstances (Cossacks, Chechens, Crimean Tatars,

Volga Germans, Moldavians, Kalmyks, Karachai, Balkars, Ingush, Greeks,

Bulgars, Crimean Armenians, Meskhetian Turks, Kurds, and Khemshins).

The campaign against the Jews was also much less consistent and effective

90 Vol. 5, No. 3 The Occidental Quarterly

than the Soviet campaigns against the children of the former elite—the factory

owners, the Cossack officers, and the middle classes and intelligentsia—had

been (p. 308).

Unlike the purges of the 1930s that sometimes targeted Jews as member

of the elite (albeit at far less than their percentage of the elite), the anti-Jewish

actions of the late 1940s and early 1950s were targeted at Jews because of

their ethnicity. Similar purges were performed throughout Soviet-controlled

Eastern Europe (pp. 313–314). “All three regimes [Poland, Romania, Hungary]

resembled the Soviet Union of the 1920s insofar as they combined the ruling

core of the old Communist underground, which was heavily Jewish, with a

large pool of upwardly mobile Jewish professionals, who were, on average,

the most trustworthy among the educated and the most educated among

the trustworthy” (p. 314). Speaking of the situation in Poland, Khrushchev

supported the anti-Jewish purge with his remark that “you have already too

many Abramoviches.”60

Whereas in the 1920s and 1930s children of the pillars of the old order

were discriminated against, now Jews were not only being purged because of

their vast overrepresentation among the elite, but were being discriminated

against in university admissions. Jews, the formerly loyal members of the elite

and willing executioners of the bloodiest regime in history, now “found themselves

among the aliens” (p. 310). Rather than rationalize their persecution as

resulting from the iron laws of history, some Jews began to feel guilt for their

former role. A Jewish woman writes that after her husband was arrested, her

maid told her, “You are crying now, but you did not mind when my father

was being dekulakized, martyred for no reason at all, and my whole family

thrown out in the street” (p. 311).

And so began the exodus of Jews. Stalin died and the anti-Jewish campaign

fizzled, but the Jewish trajectory was definitely downhill. Jews retained their elite

status and occupational profile until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991,

but “the special relationship between the Jews and the Soviet state had come

to an end—or rather, the unique symbiosis in pursuit of world revolution had

given way to a unique antagonism over two competing and incommensurate

nationalisms” (p. 330). A response of the Russians was “massive affirmative

action” (p. 333) aimed at giving greater representation to underrepresented

ethnic groups. Jews were targets of suspicion because of their ethnic status,

barred from some elite institutions, and limited in their opportunities for

advancement.

The Russians were taking back their country, and it wasn’t long before

Jews became leaders of the dissident movement and began to seek to emigrate

in droves to the United States, Western Europe, and Israel. Despite still

possessing elite social status and far fewer disabilities than many groups

(e.g., the overwhelming majority of the Soviet population was not allowed

to live in cities and some Christian sects were banned), Jews perceived their

Fall 2005 / MacDonald 91

situation as “unrelieved humiliation” (p. 339). Overt anti-Semitism was

encouraged by the more covert official variety apparent in the limits on

Jewish advancement. Under these circumstances, Jews became “in many

ways, the core of the antiregime intelligentsia” (p. 340). Jewish dissidents

whose parents had run the Gulags, the deportations, and the state-sponsored

famines, now led the “urgent call for social justice” (p. 342). Jewish academics

with “cult followings” (p. 342)—a familiar Jewish pattern61—and close

ties to Western Jewish intellectuals became the intellectual vanguard and

iconoclasts of the new culture of critique in the Soviet Union.

Applications to leave the USSR increased dramatically after Israel’s Six-Day

War of 1967, which, as in the United States and Eastern Europe, resulted in an

upsurge of Jewish identification and ethnic pride. The floodgates were eventually

opened by Gorbachev in the late 1980s, and by 1994, 1.2 million Soviet Jews had

emigrated—43% of the total. By 2002, there were only 230,000 Jews left in the

Russian Federation, 0.16% of the population. These remaining Jews nevertheless

exhibit the typical Ashkenazi pattern of high achievement and overrepresentation

among the elite, including six of the seven oligarchs who emerged in control of

the Soviet economy and media in the period of de-nationalization (p. 362).

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this dénouement did not result in any sense of collective

guilt among Soviet Jews (p. 345) or among their American apologists. Indeed,

American Jewish media figures who were blacklisted because of Communist

affiliations in the 1940s are now heroes, honored by the film industry, praised

in newspapers, their work exhibited in museums.62 At the same time, the cause

of Soviet Jews and their ability to emigrate became a critical rallying point for

American Jewish activist organizations and a defining feature of neoconservatism

as a Jewish intellectual and political movement. (For example, Richard Perle,

a key neoconservative, was Senator Henry Jackson’s most important security

advisor from 1969 to 1979 and organized Congressional support for the Jackson-

Vanik Amendment linking U.S.-Soviet trade to the ability of Jews to emigrate

from the Soviet Union. The bill was passed over strenuous opposition from

the Nixon administration.) Jewish activist organizations and many Jewish

historians portray the Soviet Jewish experience as a sojourn in the land of the

“Red Pharaohs” (p. 360). The historical legacy is that Jews were the passive,

uncomprehending victims of the White armies, the Nazis, the Ukrainian

nationalists, and the postwar Soviet state, nothing more.

THE ISSUE OF JEWISH CULPABILITY

Alexander Solzhenitsyn calls on Jews to accept moral responsibility for the

Jews who “took part in the iron Bolshevik leadership and, even more so, in the

ideological guidance of a huge country down a false path.…[and for the Jewish

role in the] Cheka executions, the drowning of the barges with the condemned

in the White and Caspian Seas, collectivization, the Ukrainian famine—in all the

vile acts of the Soviet regime” (quoted on p. 360). But according to Slezkine, there

92 Vol. 5, No. 3 The Occidental Quarterly

can be no collective guilt because Soviet violence, unlike the Nazi persecution of

the Jews, was not tribal violence. Violence of the Soviet sort has “no legitimate

heirs—for either the victims or the perpetrators” (p. 345). Slezkine acknowledges

that Jews were “the most enthusiastic ethnically defined supporters of the Soviet

state” but he essentially argues that Jews were not really Jews when they were

Communists, at least until World War II caused them to be conscious of their

Jewish identities. After all, the legacy of Communism “was almost as strongly

committed to cosmopolitanism as it was to mass violence” (p. 346).

Again we see the importance of Slezkine’s claims that Jewish Communists

lacked a Jewish identity. However, as demonstrated above, there can be little

doubt that Soviet Jews thought of themselves as Jews (although they certainly were

not religious Jews) and that they worked together on the basis of shared Jewish

ethnic identity. Nevertheless, the critical issue for collective guilt is whether the

Jewish enthusiasm for the Soviet state and the enthusiastic participation of Jews

in the violence against what Slezkine terms “rural backwardness and religion”

(p. 346) had something to do with their Jewish identity.

This is a more difficult claim to establish, but the outlines of the argument

are quite clear. Even granting the possibility that the revolutionary vanguard

composed of Jews like Trotsky that spearheaded the Bolshevik Revolution was

far more influenced by a universalist utopian vision than by their upbringing

in traditional Judaism, it does not follow that this was the case for the millions

of Jews who left the shtetl towns of the Pale of Settlement to migrate to Moscow

and the urban centers of the new state. The migration of the Jews to the urban

centers of the USSR is a critical aspect of Slezkine’s presentation, but it strains

credulity to suppose that these migrants threw off, completely and immediately,

all remnants of the Eastern European shtetl culture which, Slezkine acknowledges,

had a deep sense of estrangement from non-Jewish culture, and in particular

a fear and hatred of peasants resulting from the traditional economic relations

between Jews and peasants and exacerbated by the long and recent history of

anti-Jewish pogroms carried out by peasants. Traditional Jewish shtetl culture

also had a very negative attitude toward Christianity, not only as the central

cultural icon of the outgroup but as associated in their minds with a long history

of anti-Jewish persecution. The same situation doubtless occurred in Poland,

where the efforts of even the most “de-ethnicized” Jewish Communists to recruit

Poles were inhibited by traditional Jewish attitudes of superiority toward and

estrangement from traditional Polish culture.63

In other words, the war against “rural backwardness and religion” was exactly

the sort of war that a traditional Jew would have supported wholeheartedly,

because it was a war against everything they hated and thought of as oppressing

them. Of course traditional shtetl Jews also hated the tsar and his government

due to restrictions on Jews and because they did not think that the government

did enough to rein in anti-Jewish violence. There can be little doubt that Lenin’s

Fall 2005 / MacDonald 93

contempt for “the thick-skulled, boorish, inert, and bearishly savage Russian or

Ukrainian peasant” was shared by the vast majority of shtetl Jews prior to the

Revolution and after it. Those Jews who defiled the holy places of traditional

Russian culture and published anti-Christian periodicals doubtless reveled in

their tasks for entirely Jewish reasons, and, as Gorky worried, their activities not

unreasonably stoked the anti-Semitism of the period. Given the anti-Christian

attitudes of traditional shtetl Jews, it is very difficult to believe that the Jews

engaged in campaigns against Christianity did not have a sense of revenge

against the old culture that they held in such contempt.

Indeed, Slezkine reviews some of the works of early Soviet Jewish writers that

illustrate the revenge theme. The amorous advances of the Jewish protagonist

of Eduard Bagritsky’s poem “February” are rebuffed by a Russian girl, but their

positions are changed after the Revolution when he becomes a deputy commissar.

Seeing the girl in a brothel, he has sex with her without taking off his boots, his

gun, or his trench coat—an act of aggression and revenge:

I am taking you because so timid

Have I always been, and to take vengeance

For the shame of my exiled forefathers

And the twitter of an unknown fledgling!

I am taking you to wreak my vengeance

On the world I could not get away from!

Slezkine seems comfortable with revenge as a Jewish motive, but he does not

consider traditional Jewish culture itself to be a contributor to Jewish attitudes

toward traditional Russia, even though he notes that a very traditional part of

Jewish culture was to despise the Russians and their culture. (Even the Jewish

literati despised all of traditional Russian culture, apart from Pushkin and a few

literary icons.) Indeed, one wonders what would motivate the Jewish commissars

to revenge apart from motives related to their Jewish identity. Traditional hostility

toward non-Jews and their culture forms a central theme in the writings of

Israel Shahak and many mainstream Jewish historians, including Slezkine, and

I have presented summaries of this material elsewhere.64 An important aspect of

Slezkine’s general theoretical approach is that relationships between Mercurians

and Apollonians involve mutual hostility, suspicion and contempt, and a sense

of superiority (p. 20). These traditional attitudes were exacerbated by the increase

in tensions between Jews and non-Jews beginning with the pogroms of 1881 and

extending, with fits and starts, into the period of the Bolshevik Revolution.

Slezkine’s argument that Jews were critically involved in destroying

traditional Russian institutions, liquidating Russian nationalists, murdering the

tsar and his family, dispossessing and murdering the kulaks, and destroying

the Orthodox Church has been made by many other writers over the years,

including Igor Shafarevich, a mathematician and member of the prestigious

U. S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS). Shafarevich’s review of Jewish

94 Vol. 5, No. 3 The Occidental Quarterly

literary works during the Soviet and post-Soviet period agrees with Slezkine

in showing Jewish hatred mixed with a powerful desire for revenge toward

pre-revolutionary Russia and its culture.65 But Shafarevich also suggests that

the Jewish “Russophobia” that prompted the mass murder is not a unique

phenomenon, but results from traditional Jewish hostility toward the non-Jewish

world, considered tref (unclean), and toward non-Jews themselves, considered

sub-human and as worthy of destruction. Both Shafarevich and Slezkine review

the traditional animosity of Jews toward Russia, but Slezkine attempts to get his

readers to believe that shtetl Jews were magically transformed in the instant of

Revolution; although they did carry out the destruction of traditional Russia and

approximately twenty million of its people, they did so only out of the highest

humanitarian motives and the dream of utopian socialism, only to return to an

overt Jewish identity because of the pressures of World War II, the rise of Israel

as a source of Jewish identity and pride, and anti-Jewish policies and attitudes

in the USSR. This is simply not plausible.

The situation prompts reflection on what might have happened in the United

States had American Communists and their sympathizers assumed power. The

“red diaper babies” came from Jewish families which “around the breakfast

table, day after day, in Scarsdale, Newton, Great Neck, and Beverly Hills have

discussed what an awful, corrupt, immoral, undemocratic, racist society the

United States is.”66 Indeed, hatred toward the peoples and cultures of non-Jews

and the image of enslaved ancestors as victims of anti-Semitism have been the

Jewish norm throughout history—much commented on, from Tacitus to the

present.67

It is easy to imagine which sectors of American society would have been

deemed overly backward and religious and therefore worthy of mass murder

by the American counterparts of the Jewish elite in the Soviet Union—the ones

who journeyed to Ellis Island instead of Moscow. The descendants of these

overly backward and religious people now loom large among the “red state”

voters who have been so important in recent national elections. Jewish animosity

toward the Christian culture that is so deeply ingrained in much of America is

legendary. As Joel Kotkin points out, “for generations, [American] Jews have

viewed religious conservatives with a combination of fear and disdain.”68 And

as Elliott Abrams notes, the American Jewish community “clings to what is

at bottom a dark vision of America, as a land permeated with anti-Semitism

and always on the verge of anti-Semitic outbursts.”69 These attitudes are well

captured in Steven Steinlight’s charge that the Americans who approved

the immigration restriction legislation of the 1920s—the vast majority of the

population—were a “thoughtless mob” and that the legislation itself was “evil,

xenophobic, anti-Semitic,” “vilely discriminatory,” a “vast moral failure,” a

“monstrous policy.”70 In the end, the dark view of traditional Slavs and their

culture that facilitated the participation of so many Eastern European shtetl Jews

in becoming willing executioners in the name of international socialism is not

Fall 2005 / MacDonald 95

very different from the views of contemporary American Jews about a majority

of their fellow countrymen.

There is a certain enormity in all this. The twentieth century was indeed

the Jewish century because Jews and Jewish organizations were intimately

and decisively involved in its most important events. Slezkine’s greatest

accomplishment is to set the historical record straight on the importance of Jews

in the Bolshevik Revolution and its aftermath, but he doesn’t focus on the huge

repercussions of the Revolution, repercussions that continue to shape the world

of the twenty-first century. In fact, for long after the Revolution, conservatives

throughout Europe and the United States believed that Jews were responsible

for Communism and for the Bolshevik Revolution.71 The Jewish role in leftist

political movements was a common source of anti-Jewish attitudes among a great

many intellectuals and political figures. In Germany, the identification of Jews

and Bolshevism was widespread in the middle classes and was a critical part of

the National Socialist view of the world. As historian Ernst Nolte has noted, for

middle-class Germans, “the experience of the Bolshevik revolution in Germany

was so immediate, so close to home, and so disquieting, and statistics seemed

to prove the overwhelming participation of Jewish ringleaders so irrefutably,”

that even many liberals believed in Jewish responsibility.72 Jewish involvement

in the horrors of Communism was also an important sentiment in Hitler’s desire

to destroy the USSR and in the anti-Jewish actions of the German National

Socialist government. Jews and Jewish organizations were also important forces

in inducing the Western democracies to side with Stalin rather than Hitler in

World War II.

The victory over National Socialism set the stage for the tremendous increase

in Jewish power in the post-World War II Western world, in the end more than

compensating for the decline of Jews in the Soviet Union. As Slezkine shows, the

children of Jewish immigrants assumed an elite position in the United States, just

as they had in the Soviet Union and throughout Eastern Europe and Germany

prior to World War II. This new-found power facilitated the establishment of

Israel, the transformation of the United States and other Western nations in

the direction of multiracial, multicultural societies via large-scale non-white

immigration, and the consequent decline in European demographic and cultural

preeminence. 73 The critical Jewish role in Communism has been sanitized, while

Jewish victimization by the Nazis has achieved the status of a moral touchstone

and is a prime weapon in the push for massive non-European immigration,

multiculturalism, and advancing other Jewish causes.

The Jewish involvement in Bolshevism has therefore had an enormous effect

on recent European and American history. It is certainly true that Jews would

have attained elite status in the United States with or without their prominence

in the Soviet Union. However, without the Soviet Union as a shining beacon of

a land freed of official anti-Semitism where Jews had attained elite status in a

96 Vol. 5, No. 3 The Occidental Quarterly

stunningly short period, the history of the United States would have been very

different. The persistence of Jewish radicalism influenced the general political

sensibility of the Jewish community and had a destabilizing effect on American

society, ranging from the paranoia of the McCarthy era, to the triumph of the 1960s

countercultural revolution, to the conflicts over immigration and multiculturalism

that are so much a part of the contemporary political landscape.74

It is Slezkine’s chief contention that the history of the twentieth century was a

history of the rise of the Jews in the West, in the Middle East, and in Russia, and

ultimately their decline in Russia. I think he is absolutely right about this. If there

is any lesson to be learned, it is that Jews not only became an elite in all these

areas, they became a hostile elite—hostile to traditional peoples and cultures of all

three areas they came to dominate. Until now, the greatest human tragedies have

occurred in the Soviet Union, but Israel’s record as an oppressive and expansive

occupying power in the Middle East has made it a pariah among the vast majority

of the governments of the world. And Jewish hostility toward the Europeanderived

people and culture of the United States has been a consistent feature of

Jewish political behavior and attitudes throughout the twentieth century. In the

present, this normative Jewish hostility toward the traditional population and

culture of the United States remains a potent motivator of Jewish involvement

in the transformation of the U.S. into a non-European society.75

Given this record of Jews as a hostile but very successful elite, I doubt that the

continued demographic and cultural dominance of Western European peoples

will be retained either in Europe or the United States and other Western societies

without a decline in Jewish influence. (Perhaps more obviously, the same might

be said vis-à-vis the Palestinians and other Arab peoples in the Middle East.) The

lesson of the Soviet Union (and Spain from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries)

is that Jewish influence does wax and wane. Unlike the attitudes of the utopian

ideologies of the twentieth century, there is no end to history.

Kevin MacDonald is Professor of Psychology, California State

University - Long Beach, and the author of a trilogy on Judaism

as an evolutionary strategy: A People That Shall Dwell Alone

(1994), Separation and Its Discontents (1998), and The Culture

of Critique (1998), all published by Praeger 1994–1998. A revised

edition of The Culture of Critique (2002), with an expanded

introduction, is available in a quality soft cover edition from

www.1stBooks.com or www.amazon.com.