Posted on 05/14/2013 11:12:15 PM PDT by rmlew
I think Stalin did go after Jews for being Jews...see the Doctors Plot.....he pretty much blamed most Jewish party members by name for being Bolshie rivals and Trotskyites
This rivalry between Jewish revolutionaries started with their preponderance with Menshies and then Lenin’s cliques and later Trotsky
And Stalin and Beria....Molotov too I guess even though his Jewish wife was imprisoned....all blamed Jewish commies as Jews of a conspiracy against the state....some party member Jews survived but likely renounced anything to do with the religion of their birth
They purged most of them as such...
Russian fellow commies turned on them
Then Fascists blamed them as communists even as commies purged them via that special Stalin disappearing photo technique
It was a severe double whammy for continental Jewry....ironically the Iberian peninsula..... fascist too....was even though not totally innocent....a rare refuge for Jews.....not sure Franco’s reasons for resisting Nazis calls for railcars
Cronos you meant Trotsky
The Doctors’ Plot was 52/53, by which time Stalin had been in absolute power for over 25 years. It seems fairly obvious therefore that Jews, as such, were not a top priority of his.
He was perfectly willing to scapegoat Jews, if convenient, just as he had targeted tens of millions before them, but by 52 he was running out of other groups to aim popular anger at.
One of Hitler’s first acts on taking control was to start isolating Jews from society, Stalin didn’t start remotely similar action for 25 years. I don’t think the anti-semitism is comparable.
SC, I think CF is just trying to recount some of the deep history of eastern European Polish/Ukrainian anti-semitism. It’s not familiar to even most educated Americans and western Europeans, whose knowledge of anti-semitism tends to skip from medieval Crusade pogroms to Spanish Inquisition to Dreyfuss to Hitler.
But the vast majority of European Jews lived in eastern Europe, particularly in the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth, as mentioned. The entire eastern part of this empire was for several centuries inhabited by recently re-enslaved or re-enserfed Ruthenian (Ukrainian) peasants and Cossacks who were harshly oppressed by their Polish overlords.
The overlords generally didn’t want to do the icky work of actually forcing the serfs to work themselves, so they hired Jewish (mostly) managers to run their estates, known as arendators. These guys operated on a fixed price to the landlord, getting to keep whatever they could squeeze or cheat from the peasants above this amount. The landlords obviously had an incentive to keep raising the “rent” to the arendator, who had to squeeze harder to keep afloat himself. The landlord lived elsewhere and didn’t have to see the consequences of his decisions.
This was basically the same system as the tax farming by the Romans in Judea, and it is a recipe for oppression and hatred to develop. See how well tax collectors were viewed by the Jews in the Gospels.
Similar mechanisms played out in Ukraine and eventually led to a massive revolt in 1648 that targeted Jews and Poles, with massive loss of life. The revolutionaries were understandably, though not rightly, uninterested in drawing fine distinctions between those Jews and Poles who had personally oppressed them and Jews and Poles in general.
As CF says, pretty much this whole area was eventually taken over by Russia, which by doing so acquired huge populations of Jews, and imbibed in the process the attitudes of the local Christians towards those Jews.
IOW, it’s not as simple as innocent Jews like Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof just trying to mind their own business. It’s a tangled mess of oppression, revolution and revenge created by an oppressive system that desperately needed to be overthrown. In this country we never had anything remotely similar except for slavery, and we are still dealing with the aftershocks of that system and its destruction over 150 years later.
You said in your original post that Jews were not targeted as Jews in Communist Russia and then in response to my reply stated they were “sometimes used as scapegoats.
Well, if they were Scapegoats then they were certainly scapegoats because they were Jews...hence...they were purged for being Jews and enemies of the state as such for being precisely that
and at times associated with Stalin’s enemies rightly or wrongly
There are reams of writings of Soviet purges of Jews
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalin_and_antisemitism
http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/125203/surviving-stalins-purges
http://globalfire.tv/nj/03en/history/stalin.htm
I know you. Your main thing here is fingering what you think is racism...and I having been a target of that know well enough.
I can only surmise you wish to believe the Nazis whom you see as Uber Nationalist white racists were worse to Jews than the Commies of whom at first at least counted many Jews in the revolutions.
Well...I agree...the Nazis were worse but just barely..and some would argue maybe not.
But that logic that Jews were not persecuted by the powers in the Soviet Union after Lenin died is just poppycock frankly and given you write lucid enough should know better.
Jews suffered under the Tsars and then allied with the new collectivist powers largely and damn if they didn’t get chewed up again...and all for being Jewish or like you said to some degree....scapegoats as Jews...being guilty of association with other Jewish segments like those under Trotsky.
Stalin had a real thing against Jews...maybe as a Georgian...but he feared any influence they could gain distinctly as Jews and authorized the killing of many many indiscriminately.
He spoke to his confidants of the “Jewish Menace” to his power consolidation as well as any Final Solution sort to his west
And Stalin had many of them killed. I think in a way he was happy that Hitler took care of his "Jewish Problem" when the Nazis occupied their part of the Soviet Union.
My original comment was on the author's statement that he was attempting to refute "the false notion that the Soviet Union was somehow preferable to Nazi Germany."
I'm about the last person you could possibly call a fan or apologist for communism or USSR or Stalin, but the Soviet Union was indeed "preferable to Nazi Germany" for many groups, notably Russians, Ukrainians and Jews.
Here's an analogy. There are 10M people in group A. Government B will, given the chance, kill 6M of Group A simply because of who they are. Government C will oppress Group A (along with everyone else in its power), but will kill probably at most under 1M of them, and then (mostly) for other reasons than their membership in Group A. I think Government C, while being no picnic, is by any objective standard preferable for Group A than is Government B.
When the Germans invaded Ukraine, they were greeted with flowers and cheering crowds. Within weeks or months the people of these regions had discovered Stalin, even as horrible as he was, was indeed "preferable" to Hitler, and they switched sides back.
I do not claim that Jews were not persecuted in USSR, only that they were not a primary focus of Stalin. A great many Jews who died were killed in the Great Purge, and were killed not because they were Jews but because they were longtime commies and Stalin was killing off anybody who might potentially be a political threat. IOW, they were killed because they lost a factional fight within communism, not for being (racial) Jews. This group had obviously abandoned religious Judaism long before.
You could get killed in Stalin's Russia for a host of reasons, and those reasons probably sometimes included being Jewish. But it is just silly to therefore claim that USSR was "not somehow preferable" to Nazi Germany for Jews. Of course it was, as sad as it is that they were given such a horrible choice of evils.
I do indeed see Nazis "as Uber Nationalist white racists." That is because that is precisely what they were, and damn proud of it. Though "Aryan/Germanic racists" is more accurate than "white racists," since they excluded large segments of the "white race," notably the Jews and Slavs (which is very odd, since the Slavs are one sub-group of Aryans).
If you're trying to lump me in with those who consider American conservatives to be white racists or right-wing in the European original sense of the term, you're barking up a very wrong tree. American conservatism, properly understood, has nothing at all to do with either the European left or the European right, aspects of which were combined to form Fascism and Nazism.
Doctors’ plot was a culmination of Stalin’s anti-Jewish campaign. It has actually started with the cases of “Jewish antifascist counsil” and “ Zionist conspiracy within (M)KGB”.
Both cases were retaliation on people supporting Israel (primarily within Czech communist party, KGB and Soviet air forces), thus second case was also another Stalin’s paranoid purge in the first place.
It is not heavily advertised fact but Soviets did a lot of work to make Israel happen. An idea was heavily opposed by UK, FDR was against it as well in terms of solidarity with Churchill, but Soviets has pulled it backed by Jewish intellectuals in US.
“Jewish antifascist counsil” were community organizers working for Soviet cause in the West during WWII. Their mission was fundraising, pushing for lend-lease, providing good press for the Soviets etc. In return Soviets promised them to help in establishing a Jewish state in Palestine.
Under pressure from inside US government has finally backed it too.
Both British authorities and Arabs were unimpressed to say the least but Soviets has started pouring captured German weapons via Czechs and provided training like they do in 3rd world now.
The problem is Israel hasn’t come further kibbutz with socialism and started to lean towards the West since the very beginning.
Stalin thought it was a betrayal and went mad. Everyone involved was declared a pro-US conspirator. Jewish counsil was first to get purged, next came the Czech government used as cover for Soviet support of Israel, next came Air Force and KGB training Israel’s airmen, intelligence and special forces.
It was actually a start of blatant Soviet antisemitism, before 1947 you could probably have a death sentence for an antisemitic joke in Moscow.
I also firmly believe it was what finally killed Stalin. It was one thing to purge Soviet military before WWII but absolutely different with “Zionist KGB” and Jewish doctors. These groups certainly had teeth to bite back.
Good post.
If you’d like to be on or off, please FR mail me.
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About time this story was being told! Bump!
I ping Jewish issues if they’ve some non religious relevance, as this article clearly does. If I see them. Usually don’t ping from the religion forum unless someone asks. Since Alouette left, I don’t think there’s a specific Jewish list.
The USSR's pro-Zionist position was created in the late 1940's in part as a way of driving the British out of the Middle East. Soviet propaganda even called for Israeli and Arab armies to join together to defeat "British imperialism." And while the USA recognized Israel first, it was only de facto The USSR gave actual de jure recognition. And yes, the Russians gave the Czech Communists the go-ahead to supply Israel during the arms embargo (though it must be noted that the Zionists had begun negotiations with non-Communist Czechoslovakia, though that country fell to Communism in 2/'48, three months before the War of Independence.
However, for whatever reason, the Soviets turned against Israel after just a few years, this time ordering their Czech underlings to supply the Arabs. Soviet propaganda became anti-Israel and pro-Arab in the early '50's, even though the Israelis themselves at this time took a position of neutrality and refused to take sides in the Cold War. Israeli leaders at the time stated that they were unaware of any anti-Soviet Bloc activity on their part and could not understand Russia's hostility. But Russia had definitely become hostile and took the side of leftist Arabs like Nasser, though apart from a few days in the '50's they didn't break diplomatic relations with Israel until 1967 (and Cuba didn't until 1973).
The Six Day War is often considered the watershed event that caused the Communist bloc to become anti-Israel, but it had already long done that, despite helping Israel to come into existence.
Stalin came to suspect that Soviet Jews were Zionist spies. Before he died he was planning to have all Soviet Jews deported to Siberia.
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