The Russian Revolution and the Jews

The Russian Revolution and the Jews
How they were affected and their role in it.
Dave Shafer
CHJ

The Russian Revolution is a very big topic
and only a tiny piece will be covered here

I don’t pretend to be a
historian – just some guy
trying to learn about
some important stuff.
There are sure to be a
few mistakes here.
The history of this time and place is very complicated and we will
only brush the surface of it.

Jewish life in Russia just before the 1917 Revolution

Empress Catherine the
Great decided in 1791
it would be a good idea
to make all the Jews
live in one area, to
minimize their contact
with the other people
of Russia. This area
was called the Pale of
the Settlement.

Originally a “pale” was a kind of pointed stick, such as was used to kill Dracula – who was
“impaled” by a pointed stake. Later a fence of that was called a “pale fence” and finally the area
enclosed by such a fence was itself called a “pale”. The phrase “beyond the pale” originally
meant outside of the accepted region where things are supposed to be enclosed. Thus the “Pale
of the Settlement” was an area where Jews were to be confined.

The area of the Pale included what
is now modern Ukraine, Lithuania
and Poland. This shows the
percentage of the local population
that was Jewish in 1905

The two top categories here are
traders in grain and religious
leaders/teachers

There were people selling wood kindling
for fires.

There were water carriers. I used to do this on
the farm I grew up on. Water is very heavy. I did
not have the benefit of the yoke over the back
and shoulders. Goyishe kopf!
There were traveling
klezmer bands

There were many
small farms and
farm workers. Also
dairymen like Tevye
in “Fiddler on the
Roof”. Almost all
buildings were
made of wood.
Livestock were kept
very close to or
inside the house.

Shtetl religious
school, 1917.
Pupils and
teacher lined up
outside. All
boys, of course.
Notice the mud.

Origin and
Etymology of
shtetl
Yiddish shtetl,
from Middle
High German
stetel, diminutive
of stat place,
town, city, from
Old High
German, place

Religious study was at the heart of the (male) community.

Some wooden
synagogues were very
large. Notice the man
standing on the lower
left. These wood
structures were easy
to destroy, by arsonists

Very few of
these old wooden
synagogues have
survived to this
day, because of
fire – accidental
or deliberate. But
there are old
photos that show
what they looked
like in their prime.

There were mostly small villages but also some large communities.
People would gather in large marketplace settings like here.

There is a popular image that despite the shtetl poverty there was
some gaiety underneath, with singing, dancing, and humor.

Of course there
were some happy
times, like this
Hassidic wedding.
There was even
(blush) sex.

The upbeat and joyous dancing
of the “Fiddler” musical and the
glorious colors in most of
Chagall’s paintings are at odds
with the grinding poverty, bleak
life and danger from pogroms in
the actual shtetls. Here Chagall
speaks about his father.
“Day after day, winter and summer, at six o'clock in the morning, my father got
up and went off to the synagogue. There he said his usual prayer for some dead
man or other. On his return he made ready the samovar, drank some tea and went
to work. Hellish work, the work of a galley-slave. Why try to hide it? How tell
about it? No word will ever ease my father's lot...”

But the Pale of the Settlement was not only occupied by Jews, in shtetls. There
were also large cities where Jews made up a big part of the population. Vilna was
about 50% Jewish (76,000 people out of the total) in 1900. The port city of
Odessa had a large Jewish fraction. There were highly educated Jews in these
cities, nothing at all like the shtetl peasants.

Vilna was a great center of
Jewish learning. Various
Hassidic dynasties flourished
throughout the Pale.
Odessa was a great
intellectual center for secular
Jewish thought with many
publications and newspapers
attracting literary writers and
political thinkers. Also
musicians and composers.
Very modern people in their
outlook.

Finally, there was a small class of very wealthy
Jewish merchants and figures in the government.
Some were indispensable to the effective running
of the Czar’s country. At the very center of the
Czar’s royal family was the charismatic self-styled
monk and healer Rasputin, who had a Jewish
secretary and was sympathetic to Jewish causes.

Czar Alexander II was a reformer
and eased some restrictions on the
Jews. He was assassinated in 1881
Czar Alexander III was paranoid
(secret police and censorship) and
cracked down on his predecessors
reforms. Many pogroms
happened during his reign. He
claimed Jews were behind the
previous Czar’s assassination. He
died in 1894.
Czar Nicholas II, the
last Czar before the
revolution in 1917.
He had government
organized pogroms

Unsophisticated reasons for pogroms Sophisticated reasons
1)Peasants can wipe out debts to
Jewish money lenders
2)Taking of Jewish property and
looting
3)Religious prejudice and hatred
4)Outrage over “blood libel”
rumors
1)Handy scapegoat during
social/economic unrest
2) “Protocols of the Elders
of Zion” conspiracy
fears and theories. We
will come back to that
later.

The blood libel was the medieval legend that Jews used the blood of a
Christian baby or child in making matzoh at Passover. Many pogroms
started this way, with rumors about a missing child.

Pogroms were an ever present fear and could start with almost no warning.

Maurice Sendak’s mother told him of hiding in a
cellar during Cossack attacks on her small Jewish
village in Poland. Young Maurice took note.

The Cossacks
were a horse-
based warrior
culture and
often did the
bidding of
the Czar to
suppress
unrest as well
as carry out
pogroms.

Cossack raids fueled the imagination of film makers like in this 1916 silent movie

Teddy Roosevelt
was president
from 1901 to
1909 and he
protested the
pogroms as
world-wide
awareness grew.

The Russian Revolution and the Jews

In 1903 there was a big pogrom in Kishinev, in what is now Moldova,
that was a turning point. It was the first one to get worldwide attention
and was discussed in the world press for weeks.

It started on Easter, 1903. with
“blood libel rumors”. Local
newspapers always carried vicious
anti-Semitic articles and they
jumped on this, aided by the local
Russian Orthodox bishop. Priests
led the crowds, with hatches and
knives.
Tolstoy condemned the
government for not stopping this.
Thousands of Jews started to leave Russia. Zionism got a big boost. There
was a big fallout from this pogrom, because of it being so widely publicized.
Two years later there was another one in the same place. It looked more
and more that life had become too dangerous to bear.

Jewish orphanage
in Belarus for
children who lost
their parents in
pogroms

In 1905 Cossack soldiers opened fire on Jews in Odessa
and the resulting pogrom killed about 400 Jews.

Jewish soldiers at Shabbat dinner, 1906
Chanukah celebration, 1916
There was a military
draft and if you
were conscripted in
the early 1800s the
term of service was
25 years!! This was
later reduced a lot.
Many Jews came
to America to avoid
this.
During WWI
300,000 Jews
served in the
Russian Army.

Because of pogroms, the military draft, and
general lack of opportunity and freedoms
many Jews came to America to escape Russia.

These 1905 pogroms were just the
beginning of many more to come soon.
Russia was having volcanic social,
economic, and political pressures that
would culminate in 1917 with the Czar
being overthrown. These rapidly
developing events are complicated and
beyond the scope of what we are
covering here. We will skip to only those
events where Jews had key roles or which
directly affected the Russian Jews.

There was great
unrest on many
fronts. Russia
lost its 1904 war
with Japan. A
New York Jewish
banker, Jacob
Schiff, had a big
hand in that with
a big loan to
Japan.
More on that
later.

Due to intense pressure
the Czar promised some
reforms to address the
turmoil. The October
Manifesto of 1905
spelled out the people’s
demands. The Czar did
too little too late and did
not appreciate the
gravity of the situation.
The promised new
freedoms, if real, gave
hope to the Jews.

What we will be doing now is like telling the story
of the American Revolution only from the
perspective of Betsy Ross and other needlework
friends. A very limited perspective. The unrest in
1905 led to what is called the Russian Revolution of
1905, which caused the Czar to make some changes.
Then from 1905 to 1917 there were some very
complicated political and social changes with
warring factions. In 1917 there was the February
Revolution and then later the October Revolution,
led by Lenin. In 1918 the Czar and family, out of
power, were killed and Russia had a civil war
between the old guard and the new Communists.
It’s very complicated. As Casey Stengel said “You
could look it up”.

For the Jews the hopes that the promised new freedoms
offered, in the 1905 to 1917 period, were more than offset by
the dangers the great turmoil of that period gave to their lives.
The Jews were blamed for the chaos of the Revolution and the
loss to Japan in that war. Many were killed during the civil war
between the reactionary White Russians and the Bolsheviks. In
the civil war following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the
reactionary White Armies made extensive use of the “Protocols
of the Elders of Zion” to incite widespread slaughter of Jews.
Now let us look at this infamous conspiracy theory.

Before we get to the
role of Jews in the
Revolution, in the form
of key players like
Trotsky, we need to
consider some widely
held conspiracy
theories.
The “Protocols” is a hoax – a Russian made up document
that claimed to give detailed secret plans of an international
conspiracy of Jews to take over the world, through finance,
publishing, politics, etc. It was published in Russia in 1905 and
was widely copied across the globe. Today many still believe it
around the world, especially in the Arab world where it is
taught in schools, despite being repeatedly shown to be a
hoax. They love it in Asia, because they want to take over the
world and see this as a blueprint for how to do it.

America has always been
fertile ground for conspiracy
theories, from the fake moon
landing, The JFK assassination
“truth”, the hoax of climate
change, vaccine lies, stolen
elections, etc. We here have
enough if this that Jewish
conspiracies have much to
compete with.
But back in Russia around the time of the Revolution the “Protocols
of the Elders of Zion” was a really big deal and very influential.

Henry Ford (the Henry Ford) bought a weekly newspaper so he could publish his anti-Semitic
thoughts. Later the columns were collected into a book that Ford paid to be widely distributed
Henry Ford
promoted the
“Protocols”

Anti-Semites seize on rumors or half truths and then
play them up in ways that suit their world view.
Example – Alexander Hamilton was born in the West
Indies. His mother was ½ black and was married to a
Jewish man. She converted to Judaism in order to be
able to marry him. But he was not Hamilton’s father.
She had a fling with a Scottish man and Hamilton was
born a bastard. He went to a Hebrew shul in St. Nevis
in the Caribbean, where he was born, and learned the
10 Commandments in Hebrew. Later in life he was
rumored to be a mulatto but the Jewish connection
seemed to have disappeared when he came to the US
and is only recently being brought to light by several
Jewish scholars. There is no evidence that Hamilton
ever thought of himself as Jewish.

This internet site links
many famous people to an
imagined international
Jewish conspiracy, like that
given in the “Protocols”.
They claim that Roosevelt,
Rockefeller, and others
were all actually secretly
Jewish (and, of course,
evil). The internet is full of
this kind of thing.

If you look hard enough you can find a Jewish connection everywhere, true or not. In 1780
Hamilton married Elizabeth Schuyler, from the very wealthy and distinctly non-Jewish Van
Rensselaer family. But if you go back far enough she had a relative back in Holland, Wolfert
Van Bijler, who was a Dutch diamond merchant around 1570. Since that trade was largely
Sephardic Jews he may well have been Jewish, 200 years earlier. But that is not a genetic
Rothschild connection since the first Rothschild did not live and flourish until Hamilton’s time.
We probably all have
some black, Jewish,
Martian, and Klingon
blood in us if we go
back far enough.
That does not prove
anything about
conspiracies.
Some claim that Hamilton’s wife
was related to the Rothschilds

To complicate things there is always the perennial
question “Who is a Jew?” If some famous person
had one or more Jewish ancestors (out of very many)
200 years ago does that make them Jewish?
Jewish conspiracy fans seize on some tenuous
connections since they see their enemy everywhere.

The internet is awash in Jewish conspiracy theories. They love to claim
that Rockefeller is/was Jewish and was in cahoots with the Rothschild
family, pulling strings behind the scenes to manipulate many world
governments, finance, and wars. Bet you didn’t know that Roosevelt
was also Jewish. Not to mention Winston Churchill.

A favorite famous quote
that these sites often pull
out is this one, from
Nathan Rothschild (1777-
1836), once the richest
man on earth. It has been
posted tens of thousands
of times on the internet.
Yet no primary source is
ever given for this quote
and it is dubious until
proven otherwise. Given
his modest personality it
would have been very
uncharacteristic of him to
say something like this.

News items like
this one from
2012 just fan
the flames of
the conspiracy
crazies.

One last one – real quick. Bet you
did not know that Winston Churchill
was Jewish. His mother was Lady
Randolph Churchill but that was not
her maiden name, which was Jenny
Jerome. Her father was a wealthy
New York theater investor, “maybe”
Jewish. And he may have changed
his name to Jerome from Jacobson
(sounds Jewishy to me). With a
Jewish mother clearly Churchill was,
ergo, himself Jewish. Many sources
on the internet refer to this.
One small problem – all these internet sources, without exception, ultimately have the same
single primary source for this information – a Tel Aviv newspaper article by some journalist.
When that article is tracked down there is only ½ of a short sentence – about five words - that
gives this information and no source is given for it. It is a house of cards that collapses under any
scrutiny. The Jerome family claims a family tree that gives zero evidence to support this.

In Russia, at least, there are
more basic facts upon which
to build conspiracy ideas.
Jacob Schiff was a very
wealthy New York banker,
dismayed at the Russian
pogroms. In response during
the 1904-1905 Russian war
with Japan Schiff lent a very
large amount of money to
Japan that enabled it to win
the war. The result was strong
Russian anti-Jewish sentiment
over this. It was also taken as
proof of the “Protocols”.
But other New York Jewish bankers lent lots of
money to Russia in that same war against Japan.

The conspiracy people blame world communism
on the Jews, partly because of Jewish financing of
the Russian Revolution. It is a fact that NY bankers
as well as some in London and other capitols
provided much of the financing that Lenin and
others needed to promote the Revolution. Before
the Revolution the Czarist government depended a
lot on foreign lenders to keep it going. It is also a
fact that most of those bankers were Jewish. So
this can sound ominous, in a “Protocols” sort of
way. But what is it that bankers do, Jewish or not?
They lend money! That is what they do. That is
the core of a banker’s business.

It would be simpler for these
Jewish conspiracy theorists to
state who is not a Jew – other
than themselves. Dick Cheney,
George Bush, Colon Powell,
Rockefeller – all secret Jews. Who
knew? And Osama Bin Laden –
actually a CIA agent pretending to
be our enemy – all part of the 9-11
conspiracy.
But now we reluctantly leave
this craziness and go back to
different craziness about Russia
Typical internet conspiracy garbage

There are internet sites
like this one where you can
see if some celebrity is
Jewish, part Jewish, a tiny
wisp of a part Jewish or not
at all Jewish.
If it is an anti-Semitic site
they will claim that just
about everybody is Jewish
and part of a grand
conspiracy. This site here
(jewornotjew.com) seems
legit.

The optics of some presidential
staffs can easily seem like fodder for
a Jewish cabal that is the real power
“behind the throne”. The internet is
full of stuff like this. Notice the
Rothschild reference.
In the case of the Russian
Revolution it is a challenge to
determine who is “really” Jewish and
what their agenda is, considering the
vast sea of conspiracy thought that
surrounds the topic.

What was the role of Jews in the Revolution?
This is mostly about who was Jewish, not so much
about what they did relative to the Revolution

Lenin – mother’s father
was Jewish. Lenin may
not have known. Real
name Vladimir Ilyich
Ulyanov
Trotsky - Both parents
Jewish, real name Lev
Davidovich Bronstein
Created Red Army
Karl Marx, died 1883– both
parents Jewish
Kerensky – Jewish father, probably
Jewish mother, hard to tell – key
transition figure

The newly created
legislature – the Duma –
represented some reforms
by the Tsar but it quickly
became a rubber stamp
body packed with Tsar
loyalists. It would not be
the first time that Jews
were to be granted
expanded rights only to
have reversals later.

Conditions of the workers had always been horrible but eventually there were strikes, like
in the Lena goldfields in Siberia. Federal troops fired on the strikers killing hundreds. What
was new was public awareness of these massacres. Kerensky (1/2 Jewish, maybe more)
rose to prominence by reporting on this 1912 Lena massacre and there were public protests
in St. Petersburg and other cities.

In 1914 Kerensky asked that the Tsar be informed that to succeed
in war (WWI) he must: 1) change his domestic policy, 2) proclaim a
General Amnesty for political prisoners, 3) restore the Constitution
of Finland, 4) declare the autonomy of Poland, 5) provide national
minorities autonomy in the field of culture, 6) abolish restrictions
against Jews, 7) end religious intolerance, 8) stop the harassment of
legal trade union organizations.
Kerensky had his heart in the right place but these reforms did not
happen before the 1917 Revolution. His role in the revolution and
the following Civil War is very complicated and will not be covered
here.

The Tsar’s
government did
too little too
late to stave off
the inevitable
revolution

Disastrous losses in WW1 led to
further unrest, soldier desertions,
and famine. When pressures
became too great the Tsar
abdicated in 1917 and a new
Provisional Government was
formed. The Royal family was
placed under house arrest.
Kerensky led the new government.
Full religious freedom was proclaimed and the abolition of all existing
discriminatory laws, three weeks after the abdication of the tsar. This
marked the official emancipation of Russian Jews (close to 20 percent
of the world Jewish population).

With the new freedoms after the March 1917
Revolution 48 Jewish newspapers sprang up. Political
parties were formed, one a Zionist group. Here is a
poster urging people to vote in a “bund” (alliance)
election. There was a very brief period of euphoria
once the hated Czar was gone. It lasted about one
month before pogroms resumed and picked up speed.
Problems
with the very
new type of
government
and society
were blamed
on the Jews
(of course).

The idea of
communism was
very appealing to
Russian Jews – a
world where all
were to be given
equal rights in a
new progressive
society and all
types of people
would get along
well with each
other. Educated
Jews embraced the
Revolution, at first.
One small problem in
all imagined utopias –
human nature

But laws giving Jews new rights did not convert well
to realities on the street. An ultra-nationalistic far
right anti-Semitic group, the Black Hundreds, did their
best to terrorize and intimidate Jews. They then
encouraged pogroms and promoted “Protocols” ideas
about a world-wide Jewish conspiracy.

From 1918 to 1920, Russian Jewry suffered
persecution and devastation on a scale that had
not been seen since the Khmelnitskii Uprising in
the seventeenth century (truly horrible to read
about). Of all the tragedies in the annals of Jewish
history, only the Holocaust would surpass this
period – right after the Revolution - in savagery
and wanton murder. To this day, experts still differ
as to the total number of Jews who perished in
these pogroms, the bloodiest of which took place
in Ukraine (remember this) in 1919 and 1920.
Literature on the subject places the total number
of victims anywhere in the range of 50,000 to
200,000 killed or mortally wounded. Not included
in this number are countless other victims who
were robbed, raped, or permanently disfigured.
Sites of pogroms

Bolshevik political poster from
1920 showing Lenin sweeping the
earth of monarchs, clergy, and
capitalism. All religions were
suppressed as being incompatible
with communism

1920 painting
showing a Bolshevik
with a red flag
threatening a
Russian Orthodox
Christian Church.

Kerensky and the Provisional
Government decided to keep Russia in
WWI, which was going badly. Lenin and
the Bolsheviks planned to overthrow
Kerensky and this temporary
government before elections could
happen and Lenin’s message to the
masses was to be Peace, Bread, and
Land. Peace means pull out of WWI,
Bread means equal distribution of food,
and Land means distribution of land to
the peasants. Lenin wanted world wide
socialist revolutions, not just in Russia.

The Czar and other
members of the
Romanov family
were shot in 1918.
Jacob Yudofsky led
that event.
The decision to kill the Royal Family was made
by Lenin and his Jewish friend and political head
Yakov Sverdlov. He died at 33 under mysterious
circumstances.

Lenin, who ordered the Romanov Czar’s family killed, and later Stalin both realized
that in the early days of a major social revolution some brutal and decisive measures
are needed to keep the young movement alive and suppress attempts to derail it.
Those charged with carrying this out were often Jewish. They may have thought this
was a necessary evil on the way to a more equal and just society. The result was even
more anti-Semitism from those affected. Stalin and Lenin may have thought this was
a good idea, to distance themselves from the political purges, suppressing churches,
and eventual horrific famine, by having Jews be the villains carrying out orders.

He created
Lenin’s secret
police. His father
may have been
Jewish – lots of
luck trying to find
out for sure.
There are people
on both sides of
this question
who want it to
come out their
way.

Jewish revolutionary
Fannie Kaplan felt that
Lenin had betrayed
the Revolution and
must be killed. There
were some firebrand
women in the early
days of the Revolution.

Russian woman in
WWI, known as the
“Battalion of Death”

Lenin had little
regard for his own
countrymen. “An
intelligent Russian,"
he once remarked,
"is almost always a
Jew or someone with
Jewish blood in his
veins."
Lenin died in 1924 at the age of 53 from several strokes and was
succeeded by Stalin, who may have poisoned him just in case the
stroke was not fatal. Trotsky thought that.

Lenin’s
tomb -
ever
popular
with the
public

Nadezhda Krupskaya
In 1890 and later when
married to Lenin. She was
widely claimed to be Jewish
by anti-Bolsheviks and later
by many anti-communist
authors but there seems to
be no evidence at all for
that. By contrast Lenin’s
Jewish grandfather was a
state secret only very
recently declassified by
Russia. Even now, 100 years
later, facts about who was
Jewish are highly charged
and controversial.

Inessa Armand, Lenin’s mistress
By 1919 the most powerful woman in
Russia, she became Lenin’s right hand.
She was a very strong feminist. Very.
Lenin was deeply in love with her and was
devastated by her early death from an
epidemic. Many details of her life are still
Russian state secrets. Her parents were a
voice teacher and an opera singer and
there is great uncertainty about their
ethnicity, but her mother may have been
half-Jewish. A 1911 report by the Czar’s
secret police claimed she was Jewish.

Maxim Litvanof – high ranking Soviet revolutionary,
diplomat and ambassador to the U.S.
Real name = Meir Henoch Wallach-Finkelstein
Many Russian Jews changed their names during
the revolution and it makes it harder now to
determine ethnicity.
Karl Radek, key Bolshevik
revolutionary,
Real name was Karol
Sobelsohn. Both parents
were Jewish.

Grigory Zinoviev
Real name is Hirsch Apfelbaum,
both parents were Jewish dairy
farmers. Very close collaborator
with Lenin.
Lev Kamenev, with Lenin
Real name Lev Rozenfeld
Prominent Bolshevik revolutionary
and politician. Brother-in-law to
Trotsky. Jewish father

Rosalia Zemlyachka
From Jewish family. Extremely tough
cookie, knicknamed “The Demon” who
organized the Red Terror slaughter.
Genrikh Jogoda
Brutal head of Secret
Police. Jewish parents.
Every culture has its
share of psychopaths and
there were some brutal
ones among the early
Jewish Bolsheviks and
later Party members. In
some cases what they did
was “pay back” for the
many pogroms.

A bitter, long, and
very bloody civil
war followed the
Revolution

Like I said, it’s
complicated

Although this war affected the Jews very
badly, they did not have much of an active
role in it and it is just beyond the time
period that I am mostly looking at. Armies
from both sides confiscated food from the
peasants and many starved. This is
separate from the later Great Famine, with
a different cause.

Stalin, as a good communist, thought that he would have all the private land, crops and
livestock taken from the peasants and made into huge collective farms where the peasants
would happily go to work selflessly for the common good. (lots of luck with that) The wealthier
peasants (kulaks) hated that idea and burned their crops and ate their livestock rather than turn
them over to the government. Oops! We forgot – now we have nothing to eat. A great famine
resulted. Stalin saw that these kulaks were going to be a big problem for him going forwards
and decided – screw it, let them all starve to death and we will start over later with new people.
Immense misery resulted, mostly in the farmland of the Ukraine – also the place where most of
the pogroms had happened. Many millions died of famine and disease. Parents ate their
children. Truly horrific conditions. Who, aside from Stalin, could the people blame? You get
three guesses here.
1)
2)
3)

Lazar Kaganovich
Jewish parents
He was the architect of
and carried out Stalin’s
disastrous plan to
collectivize agriculture.
A unintentional famine
resulted that killed
many more than was
reported at the time,
maybe as much as 10 to
20 million. There is a
lot of anti-Semitism in
the Ukraine, to this day,
over his role in this.

Stalin had stacked the Secret Police with Jews (consisting of over 30%
of the force at its highest) to create a convenient scapegoat for their
roles in the Great Purge and the great famine and, inadvertently, it
seems to have been a factor as to why so many Ukrainians were later
joining the Hitler’s SS in World War II. An opportunity for revenge.

Ukraine in 2017 erected a
statue to the early ruler of
Ukraine, who led pogroms that
killed tens of thousands of Jews
following the Russian revolution.
During Petliura’s term as Ukrainian
head of state in 1919–1920, some
35,000 to 50,000 Jews were massacred.
Symon
Petliura

Causes of Russian anti-Semitism (back then)
(Above and beyond the “usual” anti-Semitism)
1) Czarist tax collectors were often Jewish
2) New York Jewish banker Jacob Schiff caused/helped Japan’s humiliating defeat of Russia in
their 1904-1905 war. He was very disturbed by the pogroms and wanted to act.
3) Foreign Jewish bankers funded both the Czar and Lenin’s Revolution
4) Both 2) and 3) fed into “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” conspiracy beliefs
5) The Secret Police had many Jews in it. Later Stalin killed most of them.
6) There was a large perceived role of Jews in carrying out government policies that caused the
horrific famine in the Ukraine as well as government suppression of churches.

Solzhenitsyn made many strongly anti-Semitic statements about
their role in Russian history in his 2002 book on the subject.

Stalin and his daughter
Svetlana, whom he
adored. He called her
“Little Sparrow”. She fell
in love with a Jewish
artist, who Stalin then
promptly sent off to
Siberia. Her first husband
was Jewish. The highest
levels of Russian history
have always had a strong
Jewish sub-current.

Can you imagine being married to Svetlana with Stalin as
your father-in-law? I think any domestic spats with his
“little sparrow” would be quickly settled in her favor.

In summary
• Enormous Jewish cultural contributions to Russia in music, art, dance, and
literature as well as key roles in local and national government have been met -
over the ages – with brutal pogroms and lack of freedoms of every kind.
• During the Revolutions of 1905, and 1917 Jews were excited about the
possibility of positive change (how could it be worse?) and became key players
in the Revolution.
• For a very brief period there was a short spell of good times with many new
freedoms.
• Very soon after the Revolution a big reaction set in, with worse pogroms.
• During the last 100 years there have been many very bad spells and today
there is much anti-Semitism in Russia.

Communism score card
In the 20 years after the 1917
Revolution and before WWII’s losses
(of over 10 million of just the soldiers)
about 20 million Russians died as a
direct result of the 1917 Revolution.
Due to
1) The resulting Civil War of 1918-1922
2) Indiscriminate and vast political purges (the Red Terror, etc.)
3) The horrific famine and resulting disease in the Ukraine from the
disastrous forced collectivization of farms

The Russian Revolution and the Jews

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