Stalin's Jews

Stalin's Jews

It is a true - but seemingly well-suppressed - fact of history, that some of greatest murderers of modern times were Jews. Our modern history seems to have missed the fact that many of the worst Communists, those associated with many of the worst atrocities, were of Jewish background. Lavrenti Beria brought about the infamous Katyn massacre and other atrocities. Lazar Kaganovich, who personally claimed to be responsible for 20 million killed, stood atop the rubble of a Christian church proclaiming, "Mother Russia has been cast down, we have torn away her skirts!" Genrikh Yagoda sent hundreds of thousands to work on the Baltic Sea canal project where countless numbers of Russians, Ukrainians, and Baltics perished.

Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria, certainly one of Stalin's most vicious Jewish Lieutenants Natalfy Frenkel and Mathias Berman founded the infamous Gulag system, with camps commanded by figures such as Rappoport, Solz, and Spiegelglas, all of whom are mentioned at length in the work of Sozhenitzen. Ilya Ehrenburg, the World War II communist counterpart to Goebbels, incited Soviet troops to rape and maim German, Polish, and Czech women as a form of punishment. Then we have Leonid Reichman, head of the NKVD's special department and the organization's chief interrogator, who was a particularly cruel sadist. Almost 90 years ago, in December 1917, in the midst of the Bolshevik revolution and civil war, Lenin signed a decree calling for the establishment of The All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage, also known as Cheka. Within a short period of time, Cheka became the largest and cruelest state security organization. Its organizational structure was changed every few years, as were its names: From Cheka to GPU, later to NKVD, and later to KGB.

An old photo of one of Stalin's purges. Many Jews were involved in these atrocities. We cannot know with certainty the number of deaths Cheka was responsible for in its various manifestations, but the number is surely at least 20 million. This includes victims of the forced collectivization, the hunger, large purges, expulsions, banishments, executions, and mass death at Gulags. Whole population strata were eliminated: Independent farmers, ethnic minorities, members of the bourgeoisie, senior officers, intellectuals, artists, labor movement activists. It also included "opposition members" who were defined completely randomly, and countless members of the Communist party itself. In his new, highly praised book, "The War of the World", Historian Niall Ferguson writes that no revolution in the history of mankind devoured its children with the same unrestrained appetite as did the Soviet revolution.

In his book on the Stalinist purges, Tel Aviv University's Dr. Igal Halfin writes that Stalinist violence was unique in that it was directed internally. Lenin, Stalin, and their successors could not have carried out their deeds without wide-scale cooperation of disciplined "terror officials," cruel interrogators, snitches, executioners, guards, judges, perverts, and many bleeding hearts who were members of the progressive Western Left and were deceived by the Soviet regime of horror and even provided it with a Kosher certificate. All these things are well-known to some extent or another, even though the former Soviet Union's archives have not yet been fully opened to the public. But who knows about this? Within Russia itself, very few people have been brought to justice for their crimes in the NKVD's and KGB's service. The Russian public discourse today completely ignores the question of "How could it have happened to us?" As opposed to Eastern European nations, the Russians did not settle the score with their Stalinist past. But as for the Jews, an Israeli student finishes high school without ever hearing the name "Genrikh Yagoda," the greatest Jewish murderer of the 20th Century, the GPU's deputy commander and the founder and commander of the NKVD. Yagoda diligently implemented Stalin's collectivization orders and is responsible for the deaths of at least 10 million people.

A cast head of Joseph Stalin. Many, perhaps most, of his Communists were Jews, though this fact appears also to have disappeared from history. Stalin's Jewish deputies established and managed the Gulag system. After Stalin no longer viewed him favorably, Yagoda was demoted and executed, and was replaced as chief hangman in 1936 by Yezhov, the "bloodthirsty dwarf." Yezhov was not Jewish but was blessed with an active Jewish wife. In his Book "Stalin: Court of the Red Star", Jewish historian Sebag Montefiore writes that during the darkest period of terror, when the Communist killing machine worked in full force, Stalin was surrounded by beautiful, young Jewish women. Stalin's close associates and loyalists included member of the Central Committee and Politburo Lazar Kaganovich. Montefiore characterizes him as the "first Stalinist" and adds that those starving to death in Ukraine, an unparalleled tragedy in the history of humankind, did not move Kaganovich. Many Jews sold their soul to the devil of the Communist revolution and have blood on their hands for eternity.

One of the worst was perhaps Lavrenty Beria, who was born in Merkheuli, Russia, on 29th March, 1899. He joined the Bolsheviks in 1917 and was active in Georgia during the October Revolution. Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria was certainly one of the most vicious and mysterious figures of Stalin's era. Stalin's notorious police chief and for many years his most powerful lieutenant, Beria has long symbolized all the evils of Stalinism, haunting the public imagination both in the West and in the former Soviet Union. Yet because his political opponents expunged his name from public memory after his dramatic arrest and execution in 1953, little has been previously published. Beria joined the Cheka and eventually became head of the NKVD in Georgia. He prospered under Stalin and he became a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. In February, 1941, he became deputy prime minister and in 1946 joined the Politburo. After Stalin's death in 1953, Beria attempted to replace him as dictator of the Soviet Union. He was defeated by a group lead by Nikita Khrushchev, Molotov and Malenkov, and was later executed. In 1934, according to published statistics, about 40% of those holding the most senior posts in the Soviet security apparatuses were of Jewish origin. They too, of course, were gradually eliminated in the next purges. It would seem that when Jews become captivated by messianic ideology they can become among the greatest murderers in modern history. The Germans have been the only people to have directly faced their dark deeds. When will Britain, France, the USA, the other Imperial Nations - and the Jews - face theirs? A Dog That Bites, is Still a Dog "The Jews active in official communist terror apparatuses (In the Soviet Union and abroad) and who at times led them, did not do this, obviously, as Jews, but rather, as Stalinists, communists, and "Soviet people." The above quote is idiotic sophistry, deflecting blame on Jews for Jewish participation in Stalin's atrocities by using the devil's wordplay, telling us to imagine "they weren't acting as Jews; they were acting as Europeans". No blame there; let's move on.If this argument is true, then Germany shouldn't apologise or feel remorse about the "Jewish Holocaust", because after all, Hitler wasn't acting as a German, but as a "European" or a "Nazi". No blame there; let's move on. This is simply a lame attempt to tell us that Jews are "really Jews" only when they're good; when they're evil, their Jewishness is cast off and they assume some other identity. So Einstein is Jewish, but Yagoda and Beria are not? And Mordechai Vanunu? How does the world permit an argument that a person will be considered a member of the Jewish people when he does great things, but not considered Jewish when he does amazingly despicable things? Jews are unwilling to confront the history of significant numbers of their own people committing savage atrocities, so they downplay their own origin, rewrite history, and forget it. Perhaps even more to the point, what about the savage genocide and inhuman and brutal treatment the Jews in Israel inflict on the Palestinian people? When they shoot children in the head, bomb the UN school to utter destruction, destroy the American School in Gaza with white phosphor, and burn children alive, are they acting as Jews? Surely they must be.

"The Jews cannot escape the Jewishness of their own hangmen, who served the Red Terror with loyalty and dedication from the date of its establishment. Perhaps it's time for the world to remind the Jews of their own history." A Few Reader Comments I am from Russia, and everything he said is correct. I am surprised that some people do not know how bad were. In Israel you had criminals like Vilner; and even some in the Government. Look at your Roman Bronfman or Sarid or Beilin. Unfortunately it is true. And the hand that executed the Romanov royal family belonged to a person of Jewish origin too. Actually, it goes much deeper, as Jacob Schiff financed the Russian revolution. As a person of Russian extraction, I applaud Mr. Ploker's courage is saying out loud what most Russians and Russian Jews already know. The truth is never anti semitic. The only thing anti semitic is jews denying their own history. David Grier, New York, USA