.png)
“The Council of People’s Commissars declares that the anti-Semitic movement and pogroms against Jews are fatal to the interests of the workers’ and peasants’ revolution,” said V.I. Lenin, the central leader of the Bolshevik Party and the 1917 Russian Revolution, in a government declaration after workers conquered power.
It instructed “all Soviet deputies to take uncompromising measures to tear the anti-Semitic movement out by the roots.”
The Bolsheviks meant what they said.
They put an end to the pogroms and persecution against Jews that had been widespread under the dictatorial rule of the czars. Russia was home to the world’s largest Jewish population. Gramophone recordings of Lenin’s speeches against Jew-hatred were sent all across the country to spread the message.
The revolutionary government integrated Jews into all aspects of social and political life, and Jewish culture flourished in the 1920s. They took part in the mighty battles to defend the revolution against the reactionary armies of the former landowners and capitalists along with the invading armies of 14 imperialist powers. In the midst of this struggle the Red Army put an end to pogroms these forces carried out.
These blows to Jew-hatred and advances in the lives of the Jews were reversed a few years later, part of a thoroughgoing counterrevolution against Lenin’s program and policies carried out by privileged layers in the state bureaucracy headed by Joseph Stalin.
The Stalinist regime sought to drive working people out of political life, murdered the leaders of the 1917 revolution and reimposed the czarist prison house of nations across Russia. An inevitable consequence was the resurrection of Jew-hatred. The Stalinist reign of terror was wielded with special vengeance against Leon Trotsky and other defenders of Lenin’s revolutionary course. Stalin used appeals to Jew-hatred to target any who questioned his power.
When Bolshevik leaders Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev united with Trotsky to oppose the Stalinist regime in 1927, the regime’s use of antisemitism accelerated. All three were Jewish. “Jews, even when unreservedly devoted to the general line [of Stalin] were removed from responsible party and Soviet posts,” Trotsky wrote. In Moscow’s factories, “agitators spoke brazenly: ‘The Jews are rioting.’”
“The country of the great proletarian revolution is now passing through a period of profound reaction,” Trotsky pointed out in a 1937 interview. Stalin seeks “to direct especially against the Jews the existing discontent against the bureaucracy....”
No comments:
Post a Comment
Comments