....Note that the declaration was issued in 1917. The capitalist rulers in the U.K. hoped the declaration would win Jews in Russia away from the Bolsheviks.
London feared a victorious socialist revolution and the example it would set for working people internationally — including in the U.K.
Winston Churchill spelled it out in his article “Zionism vs. Bolshevism.” The majority of Bolshevik leaders are Jews, Churchill wrote. From the days of “Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxemburg (Germany) and Emma Goldman (United States), this worldwide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilization … has been steadily growing.”
The British rulers acted accordingly, spearheading the 1918 military invasion by 14 capitalist powers against Soviet Russia, backing the royalist “White Armies.” That these counterrevolutionary forces massacred over 100,000 Jews never stood in the way.
But the Bolsheviks, led by Lenin, acted decisively to draw the millions of workers and peasants to join the fight against Jew-hatred.
As the Bolsheviks led Russia’s workers and peasants, they promoted Jewish self-defense against attacks by the czarist police and reactionary Black Hundreds. They explained why the fight against Jew-hatred was in the interests of all the toilers. No nationality in Russia is so oppressed as the Jews, Lenin said. “It’s not the Jews who are the enemies of the working people — it’s the capitalists.”
Following the revolutionary victory, the Bolshevik-led government drew Jews into social life, encouraged a flowering of Jewish culture in Yiddish and appointed as the first head of the new state, Yakov Sverdlov — a Jew! They put an end to the pogroms.
So strong was Lenin’s leadership in combating Jew-hatred that, during the civil war, the counterrevolutionaries routinely referred to the Bolsheviks as the “Yid Party.” The Whites circulated an infamous poster depicting Red Army Commander Leon Trotsky as a Jewish devil.
After Lenin’s death, this Bolshevik continuity was defended by Trotsky in the face of the Stalin-led counterrevolution that revived antisemitic poison.
This history is recounted in Pathfinder’s The Fight Against Jew-Hatred and Pogroms in the Imperialist Epoch: Stakes for the International Working Class. Over the last couple of years this title has been a top seller as members of the Communist League take it and the Militant to discuss the key questions confronting the working class with their workmates, join picket lines, build social protests and go door to door in working-class neighborhoods.
Antisemitism need not be eternal. There is a course to eradicating Jew-hatred. Not by looking to the U.K. or any “democratic” imperialist power for a solution. Rather, by building proletarian parties to lead hundreds of millions to fight for workers power, uproot exploitation by capital, end all national oppression, and build a socialist world.
