Jewish Bolshevism
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The term Jewish Bolshevism, was used by enemies of Bolsheviks alluding to the fact that some of the Bolshevik leaders were of Jewish ethnicity or ancestry, most notably Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev and Lenin who had a Jewish grandfather. The derogatory meaning of the term is associated with the conspiracy theory that Jewry is dominated or planning to dominate the world.
A similar term used by Nazi in Germany is often translated as Judeo-Bolshevism. In Nazi Germany, this term was the expression of the perception that Communism was a Jewish-inspired and Jewish-led movement from its very origin, Karl Marx.
The significant Jewish activity in Russian Revolutionary movement has complex social roots.
In 1922, of the 44,148 members of the Bolshevik party that had joined before 1917 (the Old Guard, as Lenin referred to them) only 7.1% were Jewish (65% were Russian). The numbers of Jews were higher at the top. Of the 9 members of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik party in April 1917, during which Lenin's "April theses" were declared, 5 were Jewish (the above 3 plus Sverdlov, Sokolnikov and not counting Lenin). Of the 12 people who, during a meeting on October 10, 1917 planned the November revolution 6 were Jewish (the above 4 plus Uritsky and Sokolnikov, although Kamenev and Zinoviev opposed the revolution). See [1] for more numbers (in Russian).
The number of Jews in top administrative positions began to decline soon after the revolution.
Among Lenin's 15 peoples' comissars, only 6 were Jewish ( Trotsky, Uritsky , Isaac Steinberg [2], I. A. Teodorovich, Simeon Dimanstein and Sokolnikov). Among the 23 narkoms between 1923–1930, there were 12 Russians, 5 Jews, 2 Georgians (Stalin and Ordzhonikidze), 1 Pole, 1 Moldavian, 1 Latvian, and 1 Ukrainian.
There were 3 Jews among 5 members in the Politburo in the first half of the 1920's (Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev and not counting Lenin). There were none among the 9 members of the Politburo in 1927, the above three having been expelled from the Party. In the 1930's, there was only 1 person of Jewish descent in the Politburo, namely Kaganovich.
There are also claims that Jews, while not dominating the politics of the Soviet regime, were highly prominent among the members of the secret police and other instruments of oppression. Indeed, of the 12 members of the Cheka Counter-revolutionary department in 1918, 6 were Jewish. However, of the 42 Cheka prosecutors in September, 1918, at the height of Red Terror, only 8 were Jewish (14 Latvians, 13 Russians, 7 Poles). Only 3.7% of the rank-and-file Cheka agents were Jewish at that time.
In the mid-1930's, under the leadership of Genrikh Yagoda (who was Jewish), the Jewish presence in the secret police briefly became dominant: of the people surrounding Yagoda, 39% were Jewish and only 30% Russian. Yagoda's secret police oversaw the execution of both Zinoviev and Kamenev, but fell victim to Stalin's next round of purges: Yagoda was replaced with ethnic Russian Nikolai Yezhov in September 1936, arrested and executed in March 1937. Under Yezhov, the number of Jews fell precipitiously (to just 6 people) while the number of ethnic Russians among the leadership of the secret police, NKVD rose to 102 people (67%) and the purges, at Stalin's instigation, entered their bloodiest period (1937–1938).
See [3] and [4](in Russian) for sources, more numbers and commentary.
However, the contemporary assessments of the involvement of ethnic Jews in the Bolshevik revolution is often quite different.
Captain Montgomery Schuyler, a military intelligence officer in Russia, reported regularly to the chief of staff of U.S. Army Intelligence (the Army handled intelligence before the CIA was established), who relayed the reports to the president. In one of these, declassified in 1958, Schuyler states:
It is probably unwise to say this loudly in the United States, but the Bolshevik movement is and has been since its beginning, guided and controlled by Russian Jews of the greasiest type …<ref name="schuyler">U.S. National Archives. Record group 120: Records of the American Expeditionary Forces, 9 June 1919.</ref>
In another report on June 9 1919, Schuyler cites Robert Wilton, who was then the chief correspondent in Russia for The Times of London. He writes:
A table made up in 1918, by Robert Wilton, correspondent of the London Times in Russia, shows at that time there were 384 commissars including 2 Negroes, 13 Russians, 15 Chinamen, 22 Armenians and more than 300 Jews. Of the latter number, 264 had come from the United States since the downfall of the Imperial Government.<ref name="schuyler" />
Winston Churchill, in an article which originally appeared in the Illustrated Sunday Herald on February 8 1920, wrote:
There is no need to exaggerate the part played in the creation of Bolshevism and in the actual bringing about of the Russian Revolution by these international and for the most part atheistic Jews …<ref>Churchhill, Winston. Zionism versus Bolshevism: A Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People. Illustrated Sunday Herald. 8 February 1920.</ref>
Even the American Ambassador to Russia, David Francis, wrote in January 1918 that most of the Bolshevik leaders were Jewish.<ref>Francis, David R. Russia From the American Embassy. New York: C. Scribner's & Sons, 1921. p. 214.</ref> Also, in a report to the United States and other governments from British Intelligence, entitled "A Monthly Review of the Progress of Revolutionary Movements Abroad", it is stated in the first paragraph that international Communism is controlled by Jews.<ref>U.S. National Archives. Dept. of State Decimal File, 1910–1929, file 861.00/5067.</ref>
Russian writer and Nobel Prize winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has highlighted the big role of the Jewish people in the revolutionary movement and following the revolution repressions. He writes (translated from Russian [5]): “As we can see, during 1917 there was no selective movement of Jewish people to the Bolshevik. But even there Jewish activity in revolutionary movements appeared. At the latest meeting of the Russia Social Democratic Party (London, 1907), together with Menshevik, they (Jewish people) totaled over 160 from 302-305 attendees or over the half.”
