Tsarist Russia was the land of the knout and the pogrom. It carried out a brutal system of national oppression, which singled out the Jews for special persecution. This persecution had always led a layer of Jewish youth, who rejected Zionism, into the revolutionary Marxist movement: Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Rosa Luxemburg, Radek and many others. The socialist revolution was seen as the only way to abolish anti-Semitism and secure a future for the Jewish people. The Revolution gave the Jews all that had been denied to them: full rights, equal status with the rest of the population, and the perspective of putting their considerable talents to work in creating a new and better life for all. Tsarism had excluded the Jews. Bolshevism offered them the chance to integrate on the basis of complete equality. This was accepted by the overwhelming majority. However, even here Lenin showed great flexibility. Although the Jews were not strictly a nation (Lenin had characterised them as a special oppressed caste) they were nevertheless offered the right to set up their own homeland on a separate territory (Birobaidjan), although very few showed any interest.

The October Revolution attracted the most talented and forward-looking elements in the Jewish population in Russia and beyond its borders. Many joined the Communist Party and played an outstanding role. A case in point was the Pole Leopold Trepper who later led the famous Red Orchestra, the organisation of Soviet agents which did heroic work in the heart of Hitler’s Third Reich. In his remarkable autobiography, Trepper writes:

I became a Communist because I am a Jew. In my contact with the workers of Dombrova, I had seen the extent of capitalist exploitation. In Marxism, I found the definitive answer to the Jewish question that had obsessed me since childhood. In my judgement, only a socialist society could put an end to racism and anti-Semitism, and allow the complete cultural development of the Jewish community. (Trepper, op. cit., p. 69.)

These sentiments were typical of a whole generation of Jewish class fighters.

Reaction always sought to whip up anti-Semitism and use the Jews as a scapegoat. The very idea of tolerating anti-Semitic utterances in Lenin’s party would have been anathema. This garbage was the usual weapon of White reaction. In the civil war, it was usual to attack the Bolshevik leaders as Jews (Lenin included). But not until the Stalinist reaction against October did anti-Semitism raise its head inside the Communist Party. Anti-Semitism was used by Stalin in his struggle against his political opponents. On 4 March 1926, Trotsky wrote a letter to Bukharin protesting that in a Party branch, rumours had been put in circulation that “the Yids are making trouble in the Politburo”. (Quoted in D. Volkogonov, Trotsky, p. 281.) In attacking the Opposition in 1927, Stalin said he was opposing Trotsky and Zinoviev not because they were Jewish but because they were Oppositionists. This was intended as a sly hint to his supporters, who were not slow to take it up.

Zionism had very little support among Russian Jews, who saw in the Revolution a solution to their problem. But whereas October gave the Jews full equality and freedom from persecution, Stalinism intensified discrimination against them, playing on the age-old prejudices of the most backward layers of the population. The fact that this anti-Semitism was thinly disguised with codes such as ‘rootless cosmopolitans’ and later ‘Zionists’ did not alter the substance of the matter. Anti-Jewish campaigns were whipped up periodically, especially after the Second World War, culminating in the infamous Doctors’ Plot. This led to the demand for emigration from the Soviet Union, especially after the formation of the state of Israel in 1948.

After the 20th Congress, a delegation from the British CP was sent to the USSR to investigate allegations of anti-Semitism. Their conclusions are included in the following report, which reveals the atmosphere of open and covert anti-Semitism in Stalinist Russia:

The Soviet Encyclopaedia, which in its 1932 edition devoted about 160 columns to the Jews, reduces this in the 1952 edition to four columns. The biographies of many eminent Jews have been removed. Marx was no longer referred to as a Jew. Then came the discovery from private conversations by Comrade Levy with Jews that the years 1948-52 were known among them as ‘The Black Years,’ the period during which many Jews were dismissed from their posts, Jewish poets and writers were arrested and charged with treason and executed…

Those arrested and charged in secret were prominent political or cultural workers. Shortly after his arrest, the immediate relatives of the arrested man would be deported to some distant place and there set to work, and often at low wages. Finally, the husband would be shot, perhaps after torture, to try to force him to confess or to incriminate others. In this way, practically the whole of the Jewish Anti-Fascist committee was liquidated. (World News, CPGB weekly, 12/1/57.)

As under tsarism, the regime resorted to the Jewish scapegoat in order to distract attention from problems at home. There was an upturn in anti-Semitism after the Israeli victories in the 1967 war. This took the form of a campaign against Zionism. Even if there had been a growth of Zionism, it could never be combated by administrative means. Only to the degree that Jews could feel secure in the USSR, would Zionist ideas fail to have an attraction.

The urge to emigrate was clearly a reflection of the inability of Stalinism to cater for the aspirations of the Jews. Emigration turned into a flood after 1971 after the initiation of détente under the pressure of the Jewish lobby in the USA. More than 200,000 left the USSR during the 1970s. The Jewish population living in the USSR fell from 2,151,000 in 1970 to 1,449,000 in 1989. This stands as a monumental condemnation of the Stalinist regime that this layer preferred to take their chances in Israel rather than stay in their homeland. This stands in stark contrast to the fact that only an insignificant number of Jews chose to emigrate after 1917, despite the appalling conditions, and the absence of any legal obstacles to leaving.

October offered hope to the Jews and all the formerly oppressed peoples. That hope was shamefully betrayed by Stalinism. Only through the socialist revolution can the Jewish question be solved. The state of Israel cannot resolve matters. As Trotsky forecast a month before his assassination in August 1940:

The future development of military events may well transform Palestine into a bloody trap for several hundred thousand Jews. Never was it so clear as it is today that the salvation of the Jewish people is bound up inseparably with the overthrow of the capitalist system.[1] (Leon Trotsky, On the Jewish Question, p. 12.)

  1. Of course, the situation has changed to some extent since Trotsky wrote these lines. Half a century later, six million Jews live in Israel, which is now the strongest military power in the Middle East. But this does not at all invalidate Trotsky’s analysis. To begin with, Israel, the supposed promised land of peace and plenty, has indeed turned out to be a bloody trap for the Jewish people. This is testified by four terrible wars, and even more frightful wars in the making. Moreover, Israel exists because the USA needs a reliable bastion in the Middle East. It survives only thanks to enormous expenditure on arms, underwritten and subsidised by Washington. This, however, may not always be the case. The future of the Israeli people, without a socialist revolution in the Middle East, will be a terrible nightmare in the future. This shows how the problems of the Jewish people have also found no solution on a capitalist basis.