A recent opinion piece by a certain Ben Cohen for the ‘Jewish News
Syndicate’ entitled “Soviet
anti-Semitism in a British guise” presented the view that the Jeremy Corbyn-led
British Labour Party has adopted the trappings of an anti-Jewish political
ethos which he claims has been adopted from the Soviet Union. He also points
the finger at Corbyn for empathising with the Soviet Union which the author
charges as having operated a state policy of anti-Semitism from the time of the
coming to power of the Bolsheviks. However, a close scrutiny of Cohen’s claims
reveal that they are in several respects lacking in historicity and in others
are devoid of the context that helps explain -though not condone- the
persecutions visited upon Soviet Jewry, as well as the mutual antagonism
developed between the Soviet Union and Israel during the Cold War. Cohen’s
accusation of the Labour Party as being the repository of “Jew-hatred” is a
huge one, but one that is flawed. It is symptomatic of an ongoing series of
accusations and allegations which many are beginning to understand is a
reaction against Labour’s tilt towards a stance that is predicated not on
“Jew-hatred, but on an ideological rationale which comprehends the state of
Israel as a colonial-settler project that has involved the continuous policy of
ethnic cleansing against the indigenous Palestinian population, as well as the
above-the-law actions of the Israeli state, which acts with impunity in its
ill-treatment of the Palestinian people and its persistent defiance of international
law.
1.
Anti-Semitism and pre-World War II Soviet Union
Cohen’s
suggestion that Soviet anti-Semitism “was state policy in the USSR, arguably
from the 1917 Revolution onwards” simply does not stand the test of scrutiny.
No
professional historian of repute could accept this given that a good amount of
figures of Jewish origin served at the helm of the Soviet state. In fact, it
would not be inaccurate to state that many compartments of the state including
its political, administrative, cultural and security establishments were
dominated by Jews.
The top
echelon of the leaders of the early USSR included Leon Trotsky, the founder of
the Red Army; Yakov Sverdlov, the Chairman of the Central Executive Committee;
Grigori Zinoviev, who headed the Communist International; Karl Radek, the
commissar for the press and Maxim Litvinov, the foreign affairs commissar.
Other key figures of the time include Lev Kamenev, one of seven members of the
first Politburo who served for short periods respectively in the office
equivalent of head of state, and later as the Prime Minister of Soviet Russia.
Jews formed a
sizeable proportion of the Council of People’s Commissars (Sovnarkom), the
diplomatic corps, and trade missions. They also served as key administrators
within the state security apparatus comprising the secret police (Cheka) and
the network of labour camps. Indeed, Yuri Slezkine, the Jewish-Russian academic
who authored The Jewish Century which
was published by Princeton University Press in 2004, wrote that the NKVD “was
one of the most Jewish of all Soviet institutions.”
Before
Slezkine, the British Jewish historian Leonard Schapiro noted that “anyone who
had the misfortune to fall into the hands of the Cheka stood a very good chance
of finding himself confronted with, and possibly shot by, a Jewish
investigator.”
Slezkine also
makes clear in his book that the preponderance of ethnic Jews in the Soviet
state apparatus benefitted the aggregate of Jews living in the USSR. The
resentment this caused to non-Jewish Soviet citizens was reflected in private
letters intercepted by the Soviet state, samples of which Slezkine refers to in
his book. For instance, one correspondence in October 1925 stated that “the
Jewish dominance is absolute”. Another from the previous month, claimed that
“every child knows that the Soviet government is a Jewish government”, while
another opined that “the Jews for the most part, live extremely well:
everything, from trade to state employment, is in their hands.” And another from
June 1925 complains that “the whole press is in the hands of the Jews”.
These sorts
of observations were not confined to non-Jews. Slezkine refers to the diary of
a Russian writer named Mikhail Bulgakov, in which Bulgakov records visiting the
editorial offices of a magazine named Godless
with a Jewish friend Dmitry Stonov. While walking out of the premises, Stonov
is recorded as remarking “Reminds me of a synagogue…”
Anti-Jewish
sentiment was a matter keenly noted by the steers of the Soviet state and in
response to this, Joseph Stalin launched a massive campaign against
anti-Semitism in December 1927. At the Fifteenth Party Congress, Stalin
declared “This evil has to be combated with the utmost ruthlessness, comrades.”
What followed
were newspaper exposes, speeches by celebrities and legal action was taken
against transgressors who were prosecuted in show trials. In 1931, Stalin
himself said in an interview that “active anti-Semites” faced the death
penalty, and it was under Stalin’s watch that the Soviet state set up the
Jewish Autonomous Oblast in 1934 with Birobidzhan as its capital.
When they
took control of the Russian Empire in 1917, the Bolsheviks officially abolished
the Pale of Settlement, the region of Imperial Russia within which Jews were legally
confined. Lenin had at the outset of his seizure of power underlined the
commitment of his regime to stamping out anti-Jewish sentiment in the Russian
population. In a speech that he delivered in March 1919 called “On Anti-Jewish Pogroms”, he spoke
about the “lies and slander that are spread about the Jews” and enjoined the
Russian masses to embrace Jews as “our brothers” and to consider them as “our
comrades in the struggle for socialism”.
So much for
Cohen’s supposition of anti-Semitism “arguably” being Soviet state policy from
the 1917 revolution.
2.
Anti-Semitism in the Post-War Soviet Union
While he is
less than definitive in his claim of the existence of an anti-Jewish state
policy from the time of the Bolshevik ascent to power and the official
inception of the Soviet Union, Cohen expresses a greater level of certainty
about state-sponsored anti-Semitism in the post-war years. He is on surer
ground here. The ‘anti-Cosmopolitical campaign’, and the ‘Doctor’s Plot’, for
instance, bear testament to this. There is evidence of state policies in areas
such as education and employment which targeted Jews on the basis of their
ethnicity. In a similar vein, it is clear that there were policies directed at
Jews on the basis of their commitment to an ideology which stood in opposition
to that of the Soviet state.
However, what
Cohen fails to do is to give this turn of events a proper socio-historical
context. Why would the Soviet Union which as Cohen acknowledges “liberated
Auschwitz in 1945”, and which, although he does not refer to it, was the first
country to provide de jure recognition to the state of Israel after its
creation in 1948, turn from a state policy geared towards combating
anti-Semitism to one of state sanctioned persecution?
The Second World War, which was known as ‘The Great Patriotic War’ during its prosecution, as
indeed it is still known to this day, involved Stalin’s invocation of Russian
history and sense of patriotism as a motivational tool to fight the invader
armed forces of the German Reich.
While the
Soviet effort essentially involved a coalition of the different ethnic groups
who lived in the Soviet Union, the heightened atmosphere of national feeling
created the conditions within which ethnic Russians began to consider
themselves to be underrepresented and Jews overrepresented in many
institutions, and sought to regain control -as they perceived it- of these
institutions. Thus a clandestine system of quotas was implemented in the social
and economic spheres such as in relation to the admission of Jews into the
Communist Party, the army, and trade unions. This does not serve as an excuse
for the venom of racism, but supplies the necessary background, without which
anti-Jewish feeling is simply presented as an inexplicable phenomenon.
The other
post-war development to contribute to what would formally develop into an era
of persecution was the growth among Soviet Jews of the ideology of political Zionism.
While Stalin may have been favourable to the creation of an Israeli state which
he thought would serve as a Soviet-friendly outpost in the Middle East that was
dominated by the old European colonial powers (he assumed that the new state,
led by Labour Zionists, many of whom originated from the old Russian Empire
would be a socialist one with a pro-Soviet outlook), he soon became
disillusioned and evidently believed that the loyalties of Soviet Jews would be
focused on a foreign state rather than on the Soviet state.
The
beginnings of a purge is evidenced by the so-called ‘Doctors Plot’ and the
clamp down on the membership of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee most notably
through the murder of its chairman Solomon Mikhoels, and the sending to a gulag
of individuals such as Polina Zhemchuzhina, the Jewish wife of long-time
foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov, who was an active supporter of the
committee.
It is
important to note that Jews were not the only victims of Soviet state policies
in the aftermath of the war. In fact, beginning during the war, other ethnic
groups and nationalities bore the brunt of state-directed programmes which
targeted them with mass deportation and persecution.
These include
ethnic Germans, Koreans, Finns and other diaspora nationalities such as
Karachais, Kalmyks, Chechens, Inguish, Balkars, Crimean Tartars, and Meskhetian
Turks. The internal measures of forced repatriation were based on the premise
of collaboration with the wartime enemies of the Soviet state, and were carried
out on the basis of being either preventive or punitive.
It is also
important to note that Soviet Jewry did not suffer the same fate as these
nationality groups and no documentary evidence of a plan to deport the Jewish
population to Siberia or other Soviet region has ever materialised. As
Antonella Salomoni wrote in a 2010 essay entitled “State-Sponsored
Anti-Semitism in Postwar USSR. Studies and Research Perspectives”, the
allegation of a planned mass deportation of Soviet Jews is “a ‘myth’, which was
the product of ‘social hysteria’ and panic permeating the Jewish community in
the years immediately after the war and the Holocaust, later on purposely
fomented in the peculiar context of the cold war.”
The Cold War
became a stage through which the anti-colonial stance of the Soviet Union
clashed with Israel’s affiliation with the United States, the ideological
competitor of the Soviet Union, which of course was perceived as a force for
global imperialism. The political and military enmity between the Soviet Union
and Israel was also fueled by Soviet support for Palestinian militant groups,
as well as the granting of military aid to Israel’s major Arab foes, Egypt and
Syria.
Israel’s
leaders considered the Soviet Union to be the overseer of international
terrorist movements, and also to be the backer of Arab states bent on its
destruction. The Israeli military of course prevailed over Soviet-armed Arab armies
in the wars of 1967 and 1973. However, one other notable, but largely
unremarked upon episode during this period of mutual antipathy was the part
played by Israeli military intelligence in arming and training Hezb-i-Islami
Mujahideen, an Islamist guerilla group
fighting Soviet forces in Afghanistan during the 1980s.
While Cohen
portrays Soviet policies in the Middle East as having been inextricably linked
to anti-Jewish sentiment, he conveniently ignores the fact that the USSR
supported a whole range of national liberation movements around the world, and
that Soviet support for Middle Eastern Arab regimes was consistent with a
policy seeking to combat American influence in the region in a similar vein to
other contests for ideological supremacy in other parts of the globe.
3. Jewish
Estrangement with the Left
There is a
noticeable tendency among those who defend the state of Israel against the
political Left to explicitly or implicitly position Leftist thinking as being
somehow ineluctably anti-Jewish. The Left or the ‘hard’ Left, the argument
goes, has either always been or has now morphed into a bastion of
anti-Semitism, once the sole preserve of the far Right.
Ben Cohen’s
piece neatly fits into this paradigm.
There are,
however, problems with this narrative. And a legitimate point of scrutiny must
begin by acknowledging the historical prominence of Jewish individuals and
swathes of Jewish communities in the promotion, during a large period of the
20th century, of the radical ideologies of the Left, including Marxism.
The
contention between the ideologies of Bolshevism on the one hand, and Zionism on
the other in the hearts of Jewish communities alluded to by Winston Churchill
in a 1920 article for the Illustrated
Sunday Herald entitled “Zionism
versus Bolshevism: A Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People”, was a real
one. And the resolution of this intellectual conflict in favour of Zionism is
one that needs referencing in contemporary debates about the relationship
between the political Left and Jewry.
A necessary
part of explaining what may be termed the Jewish estrangement from the Left
must consider the waxing and waning of Jewish power and influence during the
20th century -the “Jewish Century” according to Yuri Slezkine- which saw the
diminution of Jewish power in the Soviet Union and its rise in the Middle East.
The
prominence of Jews in the empire which preceded the Soviet Union cannot be
underestimated. As Professor Robert Service, a historian once remarked, “Jews
supplied leaders and activists to revolutionary parties in the Russian Empire wildly
out of proportion to their size in the population.”
Outside of
Russia were the likes of Rosa Luxemburg in Germany, Bela Kun in Hungary and
Emma Goldman in the United States who the philo-Semite Winston Churchill once
wrote were involved in a “worldwide conspiracy for the overthrow of
civilization and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested
development, of envious malevolence and impossible equality.” He waxed lyrical
about this “mystic and mysterious race” who he claimed “have gripped the
Russian people by the hair of their heads and have become practically the
undisputed masters of that enormous empire.”
There are
numerous instances of Jewish individuals and organisations of the time
affirming that Jews were at the vanguard of the Bolshevik takeover of Russia.
For instance, an article in the September 10 1920 edition of the American Hebrew periodical which
referred to the revolution as “an achievement” went on to proclaim the event as
having been “largely the outcome of Jewish thinking, of Jewish discontent, of
Jewish effort to reconstruct”.
A few even
went further to assert a coherence between Communism and Judaism. In an article
published by the Jewish Chronicle in
1919, Leopold J. Greenberg, the paper’s editor wrote that “The ideals of
Bolshevism at many points are consonant with the finest ideals of Judaism”. And
in a book published in 1939, A Program
for the Jews and Humanity, Harry Waton, a rabbi and philosopher, claimed
that “The Communist soul is the soul of Judaism”, adding that “the triumph of
Communism was the triumph of Judaism”.
Jews were
attracted to Marxism for a multiplicity of reasons. For one, it promised
salvation from the anti-Jewish policies of the Russian Tsars, and, as Robert
Service wrote: “its replication of Judaic traditions of book-learning, exegesis
and prediction”. Furthermore, the Judaic tenet of Tikun Olam, which refers to the desire to create a “more perfect
society”, nourished the messianic impulse that has often guided the thinking of
both secular and religious Jews. As an opinion piece published in the Jerusalem Post in November 2017
surmised, “It was a utopian urge that makes one suspect Trotsky et al remained
infected by the messianic bug of the Judaism that they had vowed to shed.”
I.M.
Berkerman, one of several Jewish intellectuals who contributed to a collection
of essays in 1923 entitled Russia and the
Jews, cautioned that “it goes without saying that not all Jews are
Bolsheviks and not all Bolsheviks are Jews”. But in arguing that Jews had
committed a “bitter sin” during the revolution, he said that it was “obvious
that a disproportionate” amount of Jews who were “immeasurably fervent”, had
participated in what he called “the torment of half-dead Russia by the
Bolsheviks.” Yet, in the run up to last year’s centenary commemoration of the
Bolshevik Revolution, the writer Ruth R. Wisse saw fit to ask the following in
an article for the Tablet: “Why do
American Jews Idealise Soviet Communism?”
The waning of
Jewish power in the USSR began with the rise to power of Stalin in the 1920s.
Although some Russians have in popular lore characterised the manoeuvre as one
involving Stalin and a clique of ‘gangsters’ from the Caucasus taking power
from Trotsky and his Jewish associates at the point of a dagger, this is much
too crude and inaccurate a summation. But his outmanoeuvring of Trotsky on the
one hand and of Zinoviev and Kamanev on the other, began a trend that pushed
Jews out of the party. As Karl Radek ruefully put it: “Moses took the Jews out
of Egypt; Stalin takes them out of the Communist Party”.
The hold that
international communism held over many Jews outside of Russia took some time to
wane after Stalin’s bloody purges and the post-war policy of Russification. In
the 1950s, anti-Leftist witch hunts in the United States affected many Jews in
Hollywood, and many episodes of Soviet espionage against the United States related
to the Manhattan project involved Jewish figures.
But the
consolidation of the Zionist dream through the creation of Israel, the
burgeoning Refusenik Movement in Russia, the euphoria surrounding Israel’s
remarkable rout of Arab armies in the Six Day War, as well as the germination
of the neoconservative philosophy of which several leaders of the
anti-Stalinist Trotskyite faction of the Left played a defining role, all
serve, to varying degrees, as key developments in the severing of Jews from the
Left.
4. Corbyn’s
comments as evidence of his defence of the Soviet Union
The two
specific quotes used by Cohen as evidence of Jeremy Corbyn being a defender of
“the Soviet regime”, and of Corbyn’s disposition as an “ideological
fellow-traveller”, are symptomatic of a campaign that is geared to defame and
to denigrate.
When Corbyn
rose up in Parliament in July 1984 during a debate on employer-provided
nurseries to claim that “the Soviet Union makes far greater nursery provision
than this country”, he was in the first instance expressing the widespread
revulsion of many inside the House of Commons and in the wider public at
Conservative government plans to tax nurseries. This according to Corbyn was an
inhumane encumbrance on women who wished to work. It would, in his words,
also effectively serve as a “tax on
children”.
Hansard records him
as then going on to say the following:
The Soviet
Union makes far greater nursery provision than this country, as do many other
countries in both eastern and western Europe, including West Germany.
The snippet
relied upon by Cohen thus take Corbyn’s words out of their correct context.
Rather than upholding the Soviet Union as a paragon of virtue and achievement,
he was underlining the fact that the British government was falling short of a
standard set by countries designated as the ‘Second World’, that is, the
socialist states of eastern Europe, and by other developed Western nations such
as West Germany.
So far as his
second quote is concerned, Corbyn’s disbelief, expressed in a Parliamentary debate, that
the Soviet Union ever had the intention of invading western Europe, is one
which with hindsight a great many people of different political outlooks would
agree with. As the Cold War progressed after the Cuban Missile Crisis, it was
clear that the spectre of mutually assured destruction served as a great
disincentive for either NATO or the Warsaw Pact to initiate a full-blown conflict.
Battle plans drawn up by the Warsaw Pact such as “Seven Days to the Rhine”, a
simulation exercise of a seven-day nuclear war with NATO were framed as
reactive measures to a first strike by NATO.
Again, Cohen
conveniently ignores part of Corbyn’s rationale which was predicated on the
huge loss of life sustained by the Soviets during the Second World War. And
while his preceding words that “Conservative Members seem to be pretending that
the Soviet Union is our enemy” may at first sight strike the unerring observer
as being somewhat strange given the hostilities manifested by the arms race,
through espionage intrigues and via proxy wars, it should be remembered that
Corbyn was speaking in the context of the policies of detente embarked upon by
Soviet leaders in concert with their American counterparts during the 1970s, as
well as the later efforts of Mikhail Gorbachev to end the arms race.
He may have
been thinking of the fact that the Soviet Union entered into a war time
alliance with Britain and the United States to defeat Nazi Germany, a burden
which was largely executed by Soviet armies in epic battles such as that fought
in Stalingrad.
5. Conclusion
The present
and ongoing campaign by groups representing the British Jewish community
against Jeremy Corbyn thus cannot be fully understood without comprehending the
lengthy and complex historical backdrop of Jews and the political Left.
Once upon a
time, the majority of Jewish communities around the world were staunchly
anti-Zionist. Jewish leaders such as the American Henry Morgenthau thought
Zionism was “the most stupendous fallacy in Jewish history”, arguing that it
was “fanatical in its politics” and “sterile in its spiritual ideas”. Edwin
Samuel Montagu, a Jewish-English politician, scathingly described it as a
“mischievous political creed”. And needless to say, most Jews once adhered to
the view that the man-made creation of a modern Israel would be an abomination.
But the
triumph of Zionism over Bolshevism in the hearts of the majority of global
Jewry has contrived to link the fortunes of Jews with that of Israel.
Distinctions between political Zionism and Judaism are often blurred and
criticism of Zionism as an ideology is interpreted as an attack on the Jewish
people. This, critics point out, is borne out by the term “delegitimisation of
Israel” which the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA),
interprets as the denial of the Jewish people’s right to self-determination,
such as by claiming that the existence of a state of Israel is “a racist
endeavour”.
For many who
are aware that a fundamental aspect of Zionism, whether emanating from the
Left-wing Labour Zionists who publically espoused an accommodationist stance or
from the Revisionist Zionism embraced by the followers of Vladimir Jabotinsky,
was to expel Arab inhabitants in order to create a Jewish state, the
supposition that the creation of Israel was not a racially-motivated project is
one which does not rest well with logic. For them, the recent passage through
the Knesset of the Basic Law on Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish
People serves as a formal acknowledgement of Israel
as a racialist, ethno-state.
The frequent
barbs relating to the inherent hostility to Jewry of Left-wing thinking as well
as occasional ones pertaining to the existence of a supposedly Soviet form of
“Jew hatred” that is capable of been appropriated is flawed and in the context
of Ben Cohen’s piece intellectually dishonest.
In the final
analysis, the struggle with the Labour Party, which under Tony Blair was
ardently pro-Israeli and biased against Palestinian interests, is less about
the existence of genuine anti-Jewish sentiment and more about protecting
Zionist Israel from the sort of criticism never directed against it by a
mainstream British political party. It is a party that the instigators of the
campaign know is capable of winning a future general election, and which if in
office would be more vigorous in holding the Israeli state to account for its
multitude of violations of human rights as well as its persistent disregard for
international law.
© Adeyinka
Makinde (2018)
Adeyinka
Makinde is a writer based in London, England.
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