Kevin MacDonald also demonstrates his utter ignorance of Soviet Jewish historical realities when he argues that ex-Jews like Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and the thousands of Cheka operatives and Bolshevik party members retained their Jewish identity and “Eastern European shtetl culture.”
In fact, Jewish Bolsheviks were simply apostates who turned their back on their faith and people. Some of them were simply violent scoundrels without any sense of ethnic pride and belonging, shunned and despised by their community. Others were brutal revolutionaries—like Trotsky who refused to bury his father in a Jewish cemetery, refused to meet with Jewish delegations, and violently persecuted Russian Zionists. “I am not a Jew and have nothing in common with the Jewish people,” he said around 1919.
Jewish Communists viewed Judaism as a shameful relic of the pre-Soviet past that had to be eradicated. Thousands of synagogues were desecrated and closed down only to be re-opened as athletic societies, social clubs, and warehouses. Rabbis were arrested and imprisoned with Christian clergymen in the horrid Solovki prison camp. There, they were housed in the same barracks as common criminals.
In 1918, the Ukrainian rabbinical congress, which met in Odessa, issued a cherem—a declaration of excommunication—against Trotsky and other prominent Jewish Bolsheviks. The famous Jewish sage Chofetz Chaim characterized communism as the “destruction of the soul” and in 1927, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneerson, the leader of the Hassidic Chabad Lubavitch movement, was arrested by the Soviet secret police and only pressure from abroad prevented the Soviet authorities from sending him to a labor camp.
Thousands of Jews were murdered, raped, assaulted, and robbed by units of the Red Army in the Ukraine and Belarus during the Russian Civil War (1918-22) and the Russo-Polish War (1919-20). In the town of Gluhov, Red soldiers murdered over a hundred Jews, shot the rabbi, looted the synagogue, and tore up the Torah scrolls. In another Ukrainian town of Novgorod-Seversky, Red Army soldiers slaughtered eighty-eight Jews and maimed many others. The anti-Semitic brutality of the Red Army is magnificently depicted in Isaac Babel`s haunting novel Red Cavalry.
Large numbers of Russian Jews were arrested, tortured, exiled, and executed by the Bolsheviks for either belonging to “enemy parties” like the Mensheviks, the Socialist-Revolutionaries, and the Kadets, to “enemy classes” like the merchants and the intellectuals. At least 200,000 Russian Jews fled Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution and the Red Terror.
Russian Jews were active contributors to the anti-Bolshevik struggle. A Jewish Socialist Revolutionary, Fanya Kaplan attempted to assassinate Lenin and was executed by the Bolsheviks. Dozens of Jews served in the White (anti-Bolshevik) armies and one of them, David Pasmanik, organized the Jewish Anti-Communist Committee in Paris. The army of the anti-Bolshevik Western Ukrainian People`s Republic in Galicia and Bukovina had a Jewish detachment of 1,200 soldiers under the command of Solomon Leinberg and dozens of Jews served in the guerrilla forces of the Ukrainian anti-Bolshevik anarchist Nestor Makhno. The legendary Ukrainian Jew, Lev (“Lyovka”) Zadov was Makno`s counter-intelligence chief.
