Full text of "Russian and Jews"

Bringing history into accord with the facts in the tradition of Dr. Harry Elmer Barnes H A JOURNAL OF NATIONALIST THOUGHT & HISTORY VOLUME XIV NUMBER 5 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2008 BARNESREVIEW.COM I i ■ I Mil Lrftri 1H ■ Iri J Iri i Iri 1 1 ml LrB H L! 1 1 Kl I II P I L! V t* L! Lrfl The great Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's banned book on Russian-Jewish relations & the Christian holocaust Bringing History Into Accord With the Facts in the Tradition of Dr. Harry Eimer Barnes THE BARNES R EVIEW A Journal of Nationalist Thought & History September/October 2008 ♦ Volume XIV ♦ Number 5 Introduction to This Special Issue . . . This edition of TBR is entirely devoted to one of the most important books on the Russ- ian Revolution and the Bolshevik era ever to be written: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Jews in the Soviet Union. Together with part one, Russian Jewish History: 1 795-1916, they comprise Solzhenitsyn's massive — and suppressed — 200 Years Together. We're reviewing The Jews in the Soviet Union this issue because, as far as we know, this is the first and only full-length review of the book ever to appear in the English language. Distinguished Revisionist historian Udo Walendy reviewed Solzhenitsyn's The Jews in the So- viet Union in his magazine Historische Tatsachen ("Historical Facts"). Our English translation of that scholarly review — with many great photos added — comprises this September/October 2008 issue. We think it's a blockbuster. As Solzhenitsyn himself put it: "After 1917 life and people [in Russia] changed greatly. But literature produced a very poor reflection of these changes. The truth was suppressed and lies encouraged. Thus we arrived in the 1990s knowing next to nothing about this country. This explains the great number of surprises." The German magazine Der Spiegel asked the great writer: Your recent two-volume work 200 Years Together was an attempt to overcome a taboo against discussing the common history of Russians and Jews. These two volumes have pro- voked mainly perplexity in the West. You say the Jews are the leading force of global cap- ital and they are among the foremost destroyers of the bourgeoisie. Are we to conclude from your rich array of sources that the Jews carry more responsibility than others for the failed Soviet experiment? Solzhenitsyn replied: I avoid exactly that which your question implies: I do not call for any sort of scorekeep- ing or comparisons between the moral responsibility of one people or another; moreover, I completely exclude the notion of responsibility of one nation toward another. All I am calling for is self-reflection. You can get the answer to your question from the book itself: Every people must answer morally for all of its past — including that past which is shameful. Answer by what means? By attempting to comprehend: How could such a thing have been allowed? Where in all this is did we go wrong? And could it happen again? It is in that spirit, specifically, that it would behoove the Jewish people to answer, both for the revolutionary cutthroats and the ranks willing to serve them. Not to answer before other peoples, but to oneself, to one's conscience, and before God. Just as we Russians must answer — for the pogroms, for those merciless arsonist peasants, for those crazed revolutionary soldiers, for those savage sailors. ♦ John Tiffany, Assistant Editor GLOSSARY OF TE S FOR THIS ISSUE Bolsheviks (meaning "majority") were members of the faction of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) that split apart from the Men- sheviks. Bourgeoisie: Those in the upper or mer- chant class, whose status or power comes not from aristocratic origin; the in- corrigibly capitalistic. Central Committee: (CC) Most com- monly refers to the central executive unit of a Leninist (commonly also Trotskyite) or Communist Party, whether ruling or non-ruling. Cheka was the first of a succession of Soviet state security organizations. It was created by a decree issued on Dec. 20, 1917, by Lenin. Commissar is the English transliteration of an official title used in Russia after the Bolshevik revolution. It denotes a political functionary at a military headquarters who holds co-equal rank and authority with his military counterpart. Cossack: For our discussion, the Cos- sacks are a fiercely independent, au- tonomous culture group found in large enclaves in and around Russia. Cossack regions were the main centers for White resistance against communism. CPSU: The Communist Party of the So- viet Union (Communisticheskaya Partiya Sovetskogo Soyuza) was the ruling polit- ical party in the Soviet Union. It emerged in 1912 as the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party and then a separate party. The party led the October Revolution, which led to the establishment of a socialist state in Rus- sia. The party was dissolved in 1991, at the time of the breakup of the USSR. GPU: The State Political Directorate (GPU) was the secret police of the Russ- ian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) and the Soviet Union until 1934. Formed from the Cheka, the Soviet state security organization, it was initially known under the Russian abbreviation GPU for "Gosudarstvennoye Politicheskoye Up- ravlenie of the NKVD of the RSFSR." Gulag: Soviet labor/death camp system. It spread across Russia like a chain of is- lands, hence Solzhenitsyn's use of the term "gulag archipelago." GULAG was in actuality the government agency that ad- ministered the penal labor camps of the Soviet Union. Gulag is the Russian acro- nym for The Chief Administration of Cor- rective Labor Camps and Colonies. Eventually the usage of "gulag" began to denote the entire penal labor system in the USSR, then any such penal system. Izvestia: Newspaper started in 1917 es- pousing, at that time, mostly Menshevik views. During the Soviet period, Izvestia expressed the official views of the Soviet government as published by the Presid- ium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. KPD: The Communist Party of Germany (German: Kommunistische Partei Deutsch- lands) was formed in December 1918 from the Spartacist League, which origi- nated as a small factional grouping within the Social Democratic Party (SPD), and the International Communists of Germany (IKD). Both factions opposed WWI on the grounds that it was an imperialist war in which the working class had no interest. Kulak: A Russian agriculturalist with a small-to-medium-sized farm. Used de- rogatory by the Bolsheviks. Mensheviks (meaning "minority") were a faction of the Russian revolutionary move- ment that emerged in 1 903 after a dispute between Vladimir Lenin and Julius Martov, both members of the Russian Social-De- mocratic Labor Party. The Mensheviks (actually the majority) did not want to top- ple the czar. They were outlawed in 1 921 . Muzhik denotes a Russian peasant. Usage was especially common in pre- 1917 Imperial Russia; a reference to a person belonging to a low social class or status (specifically, working class or Third Estate). Nicholas II: Nikolay Alexandrovich Ro- manov (1868-1918) was the last czar of Russia, king of Poland and grand duke of Finland. He is currently regarded as Saint Nicholas the Passion Bearer by the Russian Orthodox Church. He and his family were massacred by order of Lenin at the Ipatiev house in Yekaterinburg. NKVD (People's Commissariat for Inter- nal Affairs) was the leading secret police organization of the Soviet Union that was responsible for political repression during the Stalinist era. Politburo: The executive organization for a number of political parties, most notably for communist parties. Pravda: ("Truth") Newspaper was the of- ficial mouthpiece of the Communist Party. Proletariat was a term used to identify a lower social class. Taiga: For our discussion, the inhos- pitable area below the Russian Arctic tree line containing mostly coniferous forests. Tass: Soviet mass media outlet. Terror Famine: The forced famine insti- tuted by the communists to kill as many peasants and farmers as possible in areas that rejected communism; 10-15 million people killed in 7 years. Tundra: A very cold Arctic region unable to support forests due to freezing temper- atures and short growing season. White Russian: Supporter of the czar. Zemstvo refers to a form of local govern- ment instituted during the liberal reforms of imperial Russia by Czar Alexander II. SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2008 ERSONAL FROM THE MANAGING EDITOR THE BARNTES REVIEW Editor & Publisher: Willis A. Carto Assistant Editor: John Tiffany Managing Editor/Art Director: Paul Angel Advertising Director: Sharon Ellsworth Board of Contributing Editors: Rick Adams Providence, Rhode Island Mark Glenn Careywood, Idaho Lady Michele Renouf London, England Peter Huxley-Blythe Nottingham, England Prof. Ray Goodwin Victoria, Texas Harrell Rhome, Ph.D. Corpus Christi, Texas Joaquin Bochaca Barcelona. Spain Juergen Graf Basel, Switzerland Germar Rudolf Gulag Germany Matthias Chang Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia A.B. Kopanski, Ph.D. KlangLama, Malaysia Vincent J. Ryan Washington, D.C. Robert Clarkson, JD. Anderson, South Carolina Richard Landwehr Brookings, Oregon Hans Schmidt Pensacola, Florida Trevor J Constable San Diego, California Daniel W. Michaels Washington, D.C. Edgar Steele Sandpoint, Idaho Harry Cooper Hernando, Florida Eustace Mullins Staunton, Virginia Victor Thorn State College, Pennsylvania Dale Crowley Jr. Washington, D.C. Ryu Ohta Tokyo, Japan Fredrick Toben Adelaide, Australia Sam G. Dickson, J.D. Atlanta, Georgia Grace-Eki Oyama Osaka, Japan James P. Tucker Washington, DC Verne E. Fuerst, Ph.D. Farmington, Connecticut Michael Collins Piper Washington, D.C. Udo Walendy Vlotho, Germany The Barnes Review (ISSN 1078-4799) is published bimonthly by TBR Co, 645 Pennsylvania Avenue SE, Suite 100, Washington, D.C. 20003. Periodical rate postage paid at Washington, D.C. For credit card orders including subscriptions, call toll free 1 -877-773-9077 to use Visa or MasterCard. Other inquiries cannot be handled through the toll free number. For address changes, subscription questions, status of order and bulk distribution in- quiries, please call 951-587-6936. All editorial (only) inquiries please call 202-547-5586. 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Periodical Rate: 1 year: $46; 2 years: $78 First Class: 1 year: $70; 2 years: $124 • CANADA & MEXICO: 1 year: $65; 2 years: $130. • ALL OTHER FOREIGN NATIONS: 1 year: $80. Via Air Mail only. (TBR accepting only 1-year foreign subscriptions at this time. Foreign Surface Rates no longer available. All payments must be in U.S. dollars.) QUANTITY PRICES: (Current issue — no S&H domestic U.S.) Bound Volumes: Library Style Binder: 1-3 $10 each 4-7 $9 each 8-19 $8 each 20 and more $7 each $99 per year for 1996-2007 (Vols. II-XIII) $25 each; year & volume indicated. ■^ his issue, TBR is proud to bring you something we know you have never seen in the English language. It is an overview and critical review of one of the most important books compiled in the 20th century. The book being reviewed herein was written by the 1970 recipient of the Nobel prize in literature and one of the most highly respected writers and philosophers of the age — Russian dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. How could such a book escape publication in the United States? For that matter, why has no one ever translated the book into English? The title should help us understand why this book has been banned and suppressed since the day it was completed. The title of the volume we are reviewing is, simply, The Jews in the Soviet Union. This volume is part two of Solzhen- itsyn 's massive two-book series 200 Years Together. Pressure from extremely powerful Zionist sources, as you have already figured out by the title, has kept this valuable work from reaching readers in the West. And the reason for that will become obvious once you dive into this issue of TBR. It details, with great precision, the Jewish involvement in the creation of Bolshevism and communism and the willing participation of Jews in perpetrating the worst mass murders of the 20th century — crimes which dwarf claims about the so-called "holocaust." The number of innocent Christian Russians who died at the hands of the Soviets is mind-boggling. Solzhenitsyn himself estimated the toll at 60 mil- lion. Many Jews, it must be added, were also crushed under the Soviet steamroller in later years, after Josef Stalin began to diminish their involve- ment in political and military affairs. The truth contained within Solzhenitsyn's The Jews in the Soviet Union might never have reached the Western world at all had not German historian Udo Walendy brought it some much-deserved attention. Over his career, as TBR readers know, this brave historian has published extremely honest and forthright discussions of World War II. For doing so he has twice been im- prisoned in Germany. Think about this courageous man and the price he has paid for the truth as you read this special issue. Please note: This detailed review by Walendy is not a fawning endorse- ment of every word of Solzhenitsyn. Instead, Walendy takes the author to task where he feels he has fallen short of Revisionist standards. In addition to Walendy, we thank nationalists Roy Armstrong and John Nugent for translating Walendy 's German review into English, and the many TBR staffers and volunteers who contributed so heavily to this issue. We think it is so important, we humbly suggest you buy extra copies to give to libraries and friends. Please see the ad on page 65 for more information. And while you're at it, please renew your subscription to TBR. We can honestly say, TBR brings you a magazine unlike any other in the world today. Please see the full color advance renew insert found between pages 24 and 25 of this issue. There you will find a really special offer you'll want to take advantage of. And don't miss the special message to all readers from TBR founder and publisher Willis A. Carto bound in the center. ♦ Paul T. Angel, Managing Editor THE BARNES REVIEW INTRODUCTI Nobel Prize Winner's Writings Still Banned By Udo Walendy Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn has proved to be without doubt both a very important and indus- trious writer. He was born on December 1 1, 1918 in Kislovodsk, Stavropol Krai, Russia. While an artillery captain in the Red Army, he was arrested in February 1945 in East Prussia because of an exchange of letters that criticized Josef Stalin between the lines and that was zealously read by political monitors. For 8 years, from 1945 through 1953, he suffered through the work camps of the gulag and then spent three more years in an internal banishment region of Kazakhstan. Afterward, he was a mathematics teacher. Assured of government approval by Nikita Khrushchev (the communist head of state after Stalin) who had introduced a free-speech period or "thaw," he released in 1962 his fictionalized account One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the first Soviet work of litera- ture about Stalin's punishment camps. It was translated imme- diately into numerous languages. Then new attacks and persecution began. None of his im- portant novels after Ivan Denisovich was allowed to appear in the Soviet Union: Cancer Ward (1968); The First Circle of Hell (1968); The Gulag Archipelago (three volumes in most printed editions, 1973-1978); and a cycle of novels called The Red Wheel, consisting of August 1914 (1971), November 1916 (two volumes, 1984) and March 1917 (two volumes, 1989- 1990). A fourth tome in the cycle, April 191 7, is not yet trans- lated into English. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970, but did not dare travel to Oslo to receive it, fearing he would be banned from Russia. That same year he was in fact excluded from the Soviet Writers Federation (which readmitted him only in 1989 under glasnost). He was expelled from the So- viet Union in 1974 and lived in Vermont from 1976 to 1994. ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN Photo taken while in the gulag. Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev reha- bilitated him in 1990 and restored his Russ- ian citizenship. The present discussion is concerned with the second volume of Solzhenitsyn 's two- volume work. Together they are called Two Hundred Years Together. In romanized Russ- ian, this is Dvyesti lyet vmestye. The first volume was Russian-Jewish History 1795-1916 and ran to 512 pages, published in 2001. In 2002 the second vol- ume appeared, a 600-page-long investiga- tion called The Jews in the Soviet Union. His preceding books, written in the form of novels, were often based on historical facts and personal experiences, and all could lay claim to correct and provable factuality regarding the historical events they de- scribed. As far as we know no one — apart from communist dogmatists unable to toss overboard their mendacious party dialectic — has dared attack or refute him on his facts. He merits outstanding recognition for this in view of the abundance of detail in his works. In his book The Jews in the Soviet Union, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has once again opened up for us a multiplicity of Russian sources that previously had been inaccessible or unevaluated in German-speaking countries. His Two Hundred Years Together series abandoned his usual form of fiction in favor of scientific analysis. Possibly this was also due to the controversial topic: Jewish power and anti-Semitism. There is only one problem with this otherwise excellent book, chapter nine, "At War with Germany." Chapter nine should also have received his usual comprehensive doc- umentary analysis. But here we cannot avoid the reproach, to be detailed later, that the Nobel Prize-winning Solzhenitsyn, whom we otherwise profoundly respect, copied for this chap- ter exclusively from biased Jewish and Soviet sources, in fact mostly from state historians, without feeling compelled to un- dertake one single critical examination. As an experienced analyst, he should have known that SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2008 BARNESREVIEW.COM 1-877-773-9077 ORDERING those historians, particularly with respect to Germany, had snatched up their pens in the same unanimous and unrestrained party-line spirit as communists al- ways do for their political diatribes. A man who otherwise understands well how to differentiate between propaganda and re- ality, and between censorship and freedom of expression, has here lost his impartiality when confronted with the extensive com- plexity of German history. In his Gulag Archipelago he confessed: "How easily did we let zealous [Stalinist] slogans lead us about on their mental leash. How satisfied we were to regard the persons betrayed as those who were betraying!" 1 In volume two he describes truly horrific events that were basic Soviet practice. But re- garding German war history, it does not occur to Solzhenitsyn in the least to think that he might still be on the leash of zealous prop- aganda. ♦ Left, a photo of Solzhenitsyn being searched by a camp guard. Solzhenitsyn was sentenced to hard labor after a criticism of the Soviet leadership was detected in a personal letter sent to a friend. Above, Solzhenitsyn in early middle age, years after his release from the work camps. He sports his signature facial hair. Below, the construction site of the Baltic- White Sea Canal (once called the Stalin Canal) saw the destruction of the lives of 100,000 prisoners in 1932-33, people taken by revolutionary arbitrariness from all the classes of all the ethnic groups of Russia. The project, whipped through to completion by the gulag administration, never fulfilled the original expectations. The canal was 140 miles in length and had 19 locks for ships up to 3,000 tons and ran from Archangel over Lake Onega but could be used only in the ice-free season from June to October. Further, in many spots it was not deep enough to accommodate larger transport vessels. TBR P.O. BOX 15877 • WASHINGTON, D.C. 20003 THE BARNES REVIEW Anti-czarist forces of the left take up positions outside the Kremlin in preparation for the October Revolution of 1917. On the front cover this issue, a painting depicts Red Guards entering the Kremlin on November 2, 1917. FIRST-TIME EVER ENGLISH REVIEW OF BANNED BOOK BY ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN "Jews in the SOVIET UNION Part 2 of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's banned book series 200 Years Together— a review by German historian Udo Walendy The Communist October Revolution in Russia The domestic and international dimensions of the Bolshevik revolution can be grasped only by fa- miliarization with what happened in the power centers of the capitals of Petrograd (formerly St. Petersburg, later called Leningrad) and, from March 1918 on, Moscow, and the consequent effects on the vast tracts of Russia. Enough books have appeared concerning this. The goal of this review is to show two things: 1) that Alek- sandr Solzhenitsyn, despite all the suffering he has undergone and learned of from his companions in fate, has remained a Russian nationalist patriot; and 2) to summarize his key find- ings. First, here is a summary of illustrative quotations from Solzhenitsyn taken from his classic and massive The GULAG Archipelago: The river [of political prisoners] that flowed in the years 1937-38 was neither the only one, nor even the main one — perhaps only one of the three large rivers that brought the dark stinking pipes of our prison channels almost to burst- ing. The river of the years 1920-30 had preceded it It had sloshed a good 15 million muzhiks (if not even more) into the taiga and the tundra And afterward there was the in- mate river of 1944-46. . . . Whole nations were pumped through the discharge pipes [such as Cossacks, Tatars, ethnic German Russians, Poles, Baits, Hungarians etc] and in ad- dition there were millions and millions of [Soviet] returnees [from German wartime labor camps and factories], German POWs and new forced labor hordes The prison pipeline never remained empty. 2 At the end of November 1917 ... the members of the Cadet Party were also declared outlaws. Arrests followed immediately. The members of the Federation of Constituents [the advocates of a democratic constitution] and the network of the "soldier universities" were immediately included. Lifted from an NKVD circular of December 1917: In view of the sabotage of the work of our officials ... a maximum of self-initiative is to be displayed by local au- thorities, who by no means should avoid using confiscations, coercive measures and arrests. 3 Solzhenitsyn writes that while Lenin was demanding the merciless subjugation of all attempters of anarchy, he published on January 7 and 10, 1918, two articles to guide his Bolsheviks, demanding, as Lenin said, "the cleansing of Russian soil of all vermin." THE BARNES REVIEW Solzhenitsyn adds: Under vermin he understood not only everything that was hostile and outside of the working class, but also workers themselves who avoided labor. . . ." 4 Vermin were naturally the zemstvo farmers, the tradesmen and all home owners It was vermin that were singing in the church choirs. 5 [Zemstvo refers to a form of local government instituted during the great liberal reforms of imperial Russia by Alexander II.] — Ed. Other vermin were high school teachers and church council members. "All clergymen [were] vermin," remembered Sol- zhenitsyn. The same applied to railroad men who refused an oath swearing armed defense of Soviet authority, telegraphers un- sympathetic toward their new masters and insubordinate trade unionists. Solzhenitsyn says: The Cheka 's [secret police] task was to settle accounts outside the court system. In all of man's history it represented a unique kind of repres- sive organ — one single authority en- trusted with spying on citizens, with arresting them, with conducting in- vestigations of them, with directing their prosecution, furnishing their judges and carrying out sentences upon them. 6 In February 1918 the Sovnarkom's chairman, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, demanded an increase in the number of prisons as well as more severe punitive repression, and in May he added concrete sentencing guidelines for the "punishment of corruption": a minimum of 10 years prison plus 10 years at a hard labor camp. 7 With regard to foreign policy the Bolsheviks secured them- selves a respite by making peace with Germany in the Brest- Litovsk Treaty of March 1918. Their representatives at the conference were Leon Trotsky (formerly Bronstein), Adolf Yoffe, Lev Kamenev (formerly Rosenfeld) and Gregory Sokol- nikov (formerly Brilliant). On August 26, 1918 Lenin instructed by telegram: "Dubious persons are to be locked up in concen- tration camps outside of the city. Relentless mass terror is to be carried out." 8 Tens of thousands of hostages were killed "for deterrence" during the 1917-1922 civil war, with hundreds drowned at a time by sinking them on barges in the White Sea in the Arctic. "'Vermin ' were naturally the small- and medium-sized farmers, the tradesmen and all home owners. It was vermin ' that were singing in the church choirs. " The NKVD instructed its local offices on August 30, 1918 with this ominous order: All right-wing Social Revolutionaries [The Social Revo- lutionaries were socialists but not Bolsheviks, hence were called right-wingers. — Ed.] are to be immediately impris- oned, and a considerable number of bourgeois and officers also must be taken hostage. By resolution of the Defense Council of February 15, 1919 the Cheka and the NKVD were instructed to seize hostages from the farmers of those areas "wherever the clearing of snowdrifts off the railroad tracks is not progress- ing satisfactorily; in this case, if the work is not done, they can be shot." On September 5, 1918 the major decree setting in motion the Red Terror followed, with instructions for mass shootings and erecting concentration camps under the direct authority of the Cheka. The decree read: "For at- tempts to escape from concentration camps the punishment is a tenfold in- crease of prison time and, for repeated at- tempts, shooting." At the end of 1920 Social Democrats were again targeted as hostages. Cheka Order No. 10 of January 8, 1921 ordered "intensification of the repression of the bourgeoisie." This was after the end of the civil war! The Cheka also continued rounding up Mensheviks (the anti-terrorist communists], and other members of smaller parties on nocturnal excursions. People were also shot recklessly on the basis of arbitrary lists — particularly academics, artists, authors and engineers. With the regulation on forced food-collection of January 1919, the farmers were also targeted. Later, in the 1930s, the mass "collectivization of agricul- ture" in Ukraine led to the death by starvation of about 6 million humans. Solzhenitsyn remembered: Any man who has not yet been flung into the sewage channel, Solzhenitsyn writes from his bitter personal expe- rience, and whoever has not yet been pumped himself through the pipes into the GULAG archipelago, should march about, joyfully above-ground, with flags flying and bands playing, praising the courts, and expressing ecstasy over his acquittal. From Solzhenitsyn 's summary in The GULAG Archipelago: SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2008 BARNESREVIEW.COM 1-877-773-9077 ORDERING What will be found in the following section is almost in- comprehensible. In order to grasp the full and monstrous truth and comprehend it down to the bedrock, one would have to be dragged through many lives in many camps — camps in which the first phase alone could not be survived without special favors from someone, since the camps were devised for your extermination. And so it happens that all who got the deep and full ex- perience of the gulag now lie for a long time in their grave, silent forever. . . . What happened to me [Solzhenitsyn here speaks of him- self as a survivor] resembles more a view through a hole in the wall of this archipelago than a panoramic view from one of its towers. Fortunately, however, more books on the gulag continue to emerge. . . . After describing the incessant horrors suffered by those dragged by the communist system into the penal and extermi- nation mills, Solzhenitsyn goes on to outline life outside the gulag — the permanent living conditions of those who had the "luck" not to be arrested by the Cheka: 1. Constant fear, because there was no security for any- one's life, dwelling or property; 2. Moving to another place was difficult or impossible; 3. Taciturnity and distrust; 4. General unawareness of what was happening; 5. Informants everywhere; 6. Betrayal as a way of life: Betrayal was all around you. ... It is easy to claim now that arrest was "a roll of the dice," as Ilya Ehrenburg claimed But arrests were a matter of quotas and state goals. And anyone who spoke publicly against them was seized in the same instant; 9 7. Destruction: The number of the prisoners that passed over the course of 35 years (until 1953) through the archi- pelago or died there amounts to roughly 40-50 million, and that is a careful estimation, because that is only three or four times the average population of the gulag; during the war, 1 percent died daily); 10 8. Lying as a way of life; 9. Cruelty (even against Cheka and state personnel). No worse ruling system can be imagined. Who were its makers, and how was it possible that this sys- tem also rode on tanks as a "liberator" into Central Europe in 1945 over the blood slick of millions of humans, hailed by the Western Allies, a USSR celebrating itself as a representative of civilized "mankind" and sitting in judgment at Nuremberg over the defeated "barbarians"? ♦ LEON TROTSKY Leon Trotsky became People's Commissar for the Army and Fleet, chairman of the "Revolutionary War Council of the Re- public," a member of the Central Committee and of the Polit- buro. He mercilessly liquidated "lackeys of imperialism and the bourgeoisie," "counter-revolutionaries," "suspect per- sons," "previous-attitude people," members and clergy of the Orthodox Church and all workers and farmers who did not unconditionally submit to Bolshevism. Trotsky nearly always surrounded himself with fellow Jews as his closest co-work- ers. He established in August 1918 the first concentration camps, and even had women and children locked up and — if necessary— shot to deter defections to the White forces (anti-Bolsheviks) or to terrify strikers. Trotsky lost his power struggle with Josef Stalin: on August 21 , 1 940, he was killed with a sawed-off ice axe (not an ice pick as so many history books proclaim) to the brain by an NKVD agent in Mexico City. Above, a quite young Trotsky sporting a goatee. Below, a photo of Trotsky in a Mexican hospital where he was placed after the attack. TBR P.O. BOX 15877 • WASHINGTON, D.C. 20003 THE BARNES REVIEW 9 Jewish Involvement in Communism No 'German Invention 9 The basis for the postwar condemnation of Na- tional Socialism was the accusation that it acted out of Germanic "race pride" and aggressively strove to conquer "Lebensrauni' in the east. Further, Germany was accused of spreading the "false- hood" worldwide that Bolshevism was identical to "inter- national Jewry" which supposedly financed and supported it for many decades. The supposed truth, we are told, is that the world-encompassing goals of the Bolsheviks and the reign of terror they spread were recognizably a "Russ- ian" phenomenon. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn examines in detail the origins of Bolshevism. He goes into both its international connec- tions, and into the involvement of Russian Jews in the rev- olutionary events of 1917-18, and he studies the totality of Soviet history [1917-91], with all its consequences, which clearly were directed against the Russian and other Soviet-incorporated ethnicities. In the following overview we have striven to reduce the multiplicity of names and their ranks and functions in the Soviet power system that Solzhenitsyn lists to the most sig- nificant ones. Solzhenitsyn begins rightly with the obligations and re- ligious roots of Jewry as scattered across the world in the Diaspora. From these derive obligations for a border-su- perseding cooperation that is not only Zionist (benefiting the concept of a Jewish "State of Israel") but much more. This worldwide, religiously and racially motivated require- ment of loyalty, which crystallized during World War I on the East Coast of the U.S. among high-level personages of international Jewry, also exerted itself upon all Jews living around the world. Solzhenitsyn makes two things clear: 1) There is a factual basis for asserting that there exists a globe-encompassing, comprehensive code that not only defines "good" and "evil" in terms of religion and race, but also derives from it vast consequences in imperial power-politics; and 2) There is an absolutely unilateral Jewish evaluation and appreciation of any human action depending on the religion, people and race to which the person in question adheres. Solzhenitsyn says: "It is said of David Ben Gurion, that he once told the world: 'What is important is what the Jews do, and not what the goyim have to say about it.' " With this basic attitude, and supported by terrorist or- ganizations, Ben Gurion justified the proclamation of the state of Israel on May 14, 1948. Therefore the Red revolution of 1917 was a conver- gence of not one but two internationally minded world- views, whose bearers certified to each other — the one on the basis of "class warfare," the other on the basis of an allegedly "chosen" religious faith (but in reality a common ethnicity) — that everything they did was always legal and could not be measured by any other yardstick. Thus Solzhenitsyn quotes from the words of U.S. Supreme Court justice and prominent Zionist Louis Brandeis: If for any reason people of Jewish blood are experienc- ing suffering, our sympathy and our assistance flow in- stinctively to them in whatever country they may live, without asking for the nuances of their faith or lack of it. 11 Solzhenitsyn supplements this with a quote from a Jewish authoress: And naturally this history [i.e., of the Jews] was, as with other peoples, not only of the pious, but also of the shame- less; not only of the defenseless and those taken away to be murdered, but also of men with arms bringing death to oth- ers; not only of the hunted and persecuted but also of the hunters and persecutors. There are pages of this history which one does not open without trembling. And these are the pages that are systematically and purposefully eradi- cated from the consciousness of the Jews. 12 Not only must the nature of these Bolshevik deeds be discussed but also the percentage of Jews in the Bolshevik cadres. In this context as well Solzhenitsyn quotes from Jewish authors, e.g., the Israeli M. Agursky, who, looking backward after 50 years, wrote: The massive penetration of Jews into all areas of Russ- ian life and into the top Soviet leadership during the first 20 years after the Revolution proved hardly constructive for Jewry, and even harmful. 13 What deeply affected the soul of the Russian people was the assault against the Orthodox Church — during which, just between 1918 and 1924, 8,000 clergymen were executed. 14 The chairman of the "Federation of Godless Militants" was Trotsky himself. His successor, likewise a Jew, Emelian Yaroslavsky (born Gubelmann), rose from mem- 10 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2008 BARNESREVIEW.COM 1-877-773-9077 ORDERING LEVI B. KAMENEV KARL RADEK KEY JEWISH COMMUNISTS: Levi B. Kamenev (ne Rosenfeld) was a trusted friend of Lenin and from 1913-14 he was editor of Pravda. From 1 91 7 to 1 927 he was a member of the Central Com- mittee of the CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union). After Lenin's death in 1924 he formed the Soviet leadership troika with Stalin and Zinoviev, but in 1925-26 his attempt, along with Zinoviev and Trotsky, to limit Stalin's arbitrary power led to the loss of all his offices. In 1936 he was condemned to death in the Moscow show trials. Karl Radek (born Sobelsohn) was from 1 91 9 to 1 923 a Cen- tral Committee member and one of the most important leaders of the Comintern. He appeared as its envoy in 1919 at the founding congress of the KPD in Berlin in a Soviet-Russian uniform. He dis- appointed the CPSU in 1 923 by the failure of his financing of com- munist revolution and agitation in Germany. In 1927 he was excluded from the party. In 1929 he was recalled from his Siberian banishment to be editor of Pravda. In 1936 he was arrested again JACOB SVERDLOV GRIGORY ZINOVIEV and in 1937 condemned to 10 years hard labor. He was beaten to death in 1939 in a labor camp. Jacob M. Sverdlov, was co-chair- man of the Ail-Russian Executive Committee, alongside Trotsky and Ephraim Sklyansky. Joint founder of the Red Army, he func- tioned as the first head of the Soviet state, demanded "pitiless mass terror against the enemies of the revolution" and ordered the extermination of the czar and his family. He died in 1 91 9. Grigory Yevseyevich Zinoviev (born Radomyslsky), from 1903 on was a close collaborator of Lenin. In 1917 he became chairman of the Petrograd Soviet and in 1919 became a member of the Politburo of the Bolshevik party. From 1 91 9 to 1 926 he was chairman of the Communist Internationale ("Comintern") to whose guidance— as the "General Staff of the World Revolution"— all communist parties were to submit themselves. He was arrested in 1935 and, after a sensational show trial in 1936, was shot for involvement in a con- spiracy to assassinate Stalin. bership in the Central Committee and the Control Com- mission to become the President of the Supreme Soviet. 15 Solzhenitsyn deplores the requirement for authors to deliberately write biased history — specifically, as Solzhen- itsyn says, "a gale of curses on the old Russia, to which have been added invented cinematic slanders." 16 And in an article in The Jewish Tribune: It is no invention to say that there is anti-Semitism in the USSR; nowadays in Russia one throws Jewry and Bolshe- vism into the same pot; of that there is no doubt. A Jewish woman doctor complained: "The Jewish Bol- sheviks in the administration have ruined my excellent re- lationship with the local population." A teacher complained: "The children yell that I am teaching in a 'Jew school,' because Orthodox [Christian] religious education is no longer permitted and because the priest has been driven out. In the People's Commissariat for Education only Jews are sitting there." 17 But the most crucial analysis of the total situation is summarized in Solzhenitsyn 's anthology, 200 Years To- gether in volume two, The Jews in the Soviet Union: Now Jews are standing on every corner and on every step in the hierarchy of power. The Russian sees him on top of the czars' city of Moscow (Lev B. Kamenev) and at the top of the metropolis on the Neva [St. Petersburg] (Grigory Yevseyevich Zinoviev) and as head of the Red Army (Leon Trotsky), the perfect mechanisms for our self- destruction. He must watch as the riverbank dedicated to Saint Vladimir now bears the famous name of Nachimson! Simeon M. Nachimson commanded Lenin's Praetorian Guard, a Latvian Rifle Regiment. Latvia, a country TBR P.O. BOX 15877 • WASHINGTON, D.C. 20003 THE BARNES REVIEW 11 plagued by organized crime, was also home to many Bol- sheviks. And as the historical Lithuanian Avenue is re- named Volodarsky Avenue (after W. Volodarsky) and Pavlovsk becomes Slutsk (after Abram Slutsky) [Abram Slutsky was a Chekist, then foreign officer with the NKVD and eliminator of Whites and Trotskyites in the USSR. Stalin rewarded him with poison in 1938. — Ed.], Solzhenitsyn says, "Russian people are now confronted by a Jew both as their judge and hangman. Likewise, Jews were commandants of 1 1 of the 12 great labor camp sys- tems." [Jewish Bolshevism — Myth and Reality, p. 204] One example is the city of Sverdlovsk, the former Yekaterinburg, the main industrial city of the Urals, named after Jacob M. Sverdlov, the first Soviet president, chair- man of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and the person responsible for the murder of the imperial fam- ily. Solzhenitsyn supplemented this enumeration with more examples: One finds them at the top of the Comintern with Zinoviev, Radek and Manuilsky; the International of trade unions, the Profintern with Dridso-Losovsky; and the Komso- mol [the communist youth organi- zation] with Oscar Rivkin, then after him Lazarus Shatskin, who presided over the communist Youth International as well. "Solzhenitsyn had still not concerned himself with recent Israeli authors, who went through sealed documents in Soviet secret archives and discovered "Lenin's grand- parents were Jewish. " With all his research, Solzhenitsyn had still not con- cerned himself at the time of his writing with recent Israeli authors, who went through sealed documents in Soviet se- cret archives and unanimously discovered "that Lenin's grandparents were of Jewish descent. Lenin's grandfather, Alexander [before the baptism = Srul Moishevich] Blank, was the son of Jewish parents." Stalin forbade Lenin's sis- ter from revealing this information. "The appropriate cor- respondence was found in the Muscovite CP archives." Among many other Jewish media reports on Lenin from the beginning of the 1990s 22 there was The London Jewish Chronicle article of February 25, 1992. The article concludes: Lenin praised Jews in extravagant terms — just as he spoke with contempt of Russians. Possibly alluding to himself, he expressed to the writer Maxim Gorky that "an intelligent Russian is always a Jew or has Jewish blood." In addition, he favorably contrasted the Jews as revolutionaries with Russians. 23 Solzhenitsyn adds: At the first foreign conferences where Soviet diplomats participated, in Genoa and at The Hague (1922), it could not re- main hidden from Europe that the Soviet diplomats and their assistants consisted to a large extent of Jews. 24 Another aspect was also astonishing: the manner in which these presidents and war ministers acted. 18 In the early party congresses after the October Revolu- tion, 15-20% of the delegates were Jewish (Jews being 1.7% of the population). 19 "In the first executive committee of the Comintern there were more Jewish than non- Jewish members" [by July 1930 the 25-member presidium of the CPSU [Com- munist Party of the Soviet Union] consisted of 1 1 Jews, eight Russians, three Caucasians and three Latvians. 20 The high portion of Jewish functionaries in the Cheka, GPU, the NKVD and KGB remained a constant topic of conver- sation. Solzhenitsyn says: Why was it that anyone who had the misfortune to fall into the hands of the Cheka could count with high proba- bility on standing before a Jewish investigator or being shot by a Jew? 21 This also applies to the Soviet officials posted to the League of Nations. The Soviet minister of foreign affairs Maxim Litvinov (born Meyer Wallach) presided over the Moscow People's Commissariat of the Exterior from 1930 to 1939 before he went on to represent the USSR between 1941 and 1943 as its ambassador to Washington; he was sent there by Stalin as his special advocate of a pact against Germany. Already, before Litvinov, back in the 1920s, "the Soviet trade mission in Berlin was 98%) Jewish," according to Maxim Gorky, the writer celebrated by the communists as the founder of socialist realism," Solzhenitsyn tells us. 25 This was probably not exaggerated. A similar situation prevailed in the other Western capitals where the Soviets gradually opened agencies. The work of the early Soviet commercial representa- tives is told in a very lively manner in a book by G.A. Solomon, the first Soviet commercial agent in the Estonian capital of Tallin (the first European capital to recognize the Bolsheviks). 26 12 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2008 BARNESREVIEW.COM 1-877-773-9077 ORDERING Jewish authors tend to conceal the shameful acts of Jewish communist executioners; however, on the other hand, they occasionally refer with pride to the high posi- tions some members of their "tribe" enjoyed under the Bolsheviks. For example, M. Zarubeznyi, author of the 1925 Yearbook of the Peoples Commissariat for Foreign Affairs, has a special list in his publication, The Jews in the Kremlin, 21 with the names and functions of various Jews in the Foreign Commissariat, and he notes that among the key figures in the literary and publishing sec- tion of the People's Commissariat he found "not one gen- tile." In a list of colleagues in the foreign offices and consulates of the USSR he found that "there was no coun- try in the world at that time to which the Kremlin had not sent its faithful Jew." A detailed list followed. Solzhenitsyn adds: Not a few Jewish names would have been found by any author in the 1920s at the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation, as well as in the attorney general's office and in the inspection agencies dealing with work- ers and farmers. Solzhenitsyn adds further names and curricula vitae of prominent Bolshevik functionaries found in government committees, cultural affairs, academics, economics, bank- ing and construction, and quotes further Jewish authors: More noticeable than anything else is . . . the significant number of Jews who became Soviet officials, and fre- quently in very high positions. Particularly, there were many Jewish colleagues in the People's Commissariats dealing with economic functions. The Jewish intelligentsia streamed in hordes into government service for the victo- rious revolution, recognizing an access that had been for- bidden them in former times. 28 As early as 1919 Jewish youth was already heading in tremendous numbers into film, that art form whose im- mediate agitational effect Lenin had praised for controlling the masses psychologically. Many of them ran film studios but others went into the republican [referring to the provincial republics of the USSR] and central [Moscow] agencies that governed the film industry, training centers and film teams. Impressive achievements of early Soviet film can un- questionably be considered as Jewish contributions. The Jewish Encyclopedia provides a long list of Jewish film functionaries, directors, actors, scriptwriters and film the- oreticians. 29 But, according to Solzhenitsyn, there were also Jews who fled the USSR: The first Soviet commissar of justice, Isaac Steinberg, resigned from his fight against the Cheka and emigrated. 30 The president of the State Bank, A.L. Sheinmann, whose signature was on every Soviet banknote, and after 1924 was additionally the People's Commissar of the USSR for Domestic Trade . . . remained abroad in April 1929, thus opting for the cursed world of capitalism. 31 ♦ LAZAR KAGANOVICH: DEDICATED KILLER As Stalin's brother-in-law and closest collaborator, Lazar Kaganovich was one of the most powerful and dangerous men in the world, an executioner with the blood of 20 million people on his hands. He also organized the gruesome persecution of his own eth- nic group in Stalin's kingdom. Kaganovich was responsible for the death of an entire generation of intellectuals and the personal signer of execution orders for 36,000 people. Kaganovich also ordered the wholesale destruction of Christian monuments and churches, including the shocking demolition in downtown Moscow of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in 1 931 . It was replaced by a giant public swimming pool, but was glo- riously rebuilt at a cost of over $100 million by the Russian people and reconsecrated in August 2000. From being the son of a shoe store owner he rose by 1924 into the Central Committee of the USSR, by 1930 into the Politburo (where he remained in until 1957); by 1935 he became a minister in several ministries and ran the Central Commission for the Examination of Party Cadres, and thus the innumerable purges, with lethal outcome. Two of his own brothers— one the munitions minister— were victims. During World War II he belonged to the State Committee for Defense. In 1 957 he was removed from all his positions after a failed coup attempt against Nikita Khrushchev. TBR P.O. BOX 15877 • WASHINGTON, D.C. 20003 THE BARNES REVIEW 13 Emancipation of the Russian Jews: The February 1917 Revolution There had been 126 years of disadvantages for Jews under the Russian state, which had begun with a 1791 ukase by Catherine the Great and was ended by the men of the 1 9 1 7 February Rev- olution. [The February Revolution overthrew Czar Nicholas II and the monarchy] The 1917 Kerensky revolution provided immediately for the equal treatment of all citizens of Russia, regardless of faith and nationality For the Jews this opened up areas of career advancement in all leadership areas. Already by 1915 the Jewish areas of settlement had been abolished; these changes were now legally confirmed. The feeling of release and the mood of excitement brought about by the downfall of czarist rule led to a first great wave of wide-ranging participation by Jewish ac- tivists in the politically relevant deci- sion centers of the country. This was connected with a migration into the cities, above all to the large cities. The arrest and shooting hysteria that the one-time oppressed of czar- ism would manifest itself all across Russia during the February Revolu- tion was still nothing in comparison with the killings that the Bolsheviks would perpetrate starting with the Oc- tober Revolution. The Little Jewish Encyclopedia (Jerusa- lem) noted "a powerful increase in political activity by Jewry, which stood out even from the frenetic elan that seized Russian society after February 1917." 32 For the first time in Russian history, Jews took high po- sitions in both the central and local administrations. 33 Solzhenitsyn confirms this statement in many pas- sages, according to which "in the first days of the February Revolution the large number of Jews at the meeting place of the State Duma [Russian parliament] and on the main squares of Petrograd [St. Petersburg] was already notice- able, and that they as agitators were essential in getting the Revolution under way." Even if Solzhenitsyn did stress the responsibility of non- Jewish Russians for the February 1917 revolution as well, he nevertheless attributed its irreconcilable character- istics to the behavior of Jews. The ethnic Russians them- selves had no cause for such depths of hatred. 34 Here one must pay particular attention to the Executive Committee of the Soviet ["Council"] of Workers and Sol- diers' Deputies, which de facto took power from Keren- "The feeling of release and the mood of excitement brought about by the downfall of czarist rule led to a first great wave of wide-ranging participation by Jewish activists. " sky's Provisional Government. Unlike Kerensky, it knew how to get its own orders obeyed, for example in taking power away from the hier- archy of the czarist officer corps in the middle of war with Germany (via its "Order No. 1"). On the Executive Committee, behind the many con- spiratorially changed names there were mostly elements of foreign origin. Solzhenitsyn said, "of the 30 truly active members . . . about half proved to be Jewish socialists." 55 However, a multiplicity of Jewish energies also went into the Provisional Government. There were both domes- tic and foreign Jewish subscribers to the "Liberty Loan" for the Kerensky government. (Jacob Schiff in New York and Rothschild in London each invested $1 million; from the Great Synagogue of Moscow 22 million rubles were collected and lent.) Other Kerensky supporters included the activists of the Jewish Bund. There was also the Party of the Jewish Proletariat, the Poale Zion (Zionist Workers Party), the Ter- ritorialists (who wanted a homeland in East Africa from the British Empire) and the Socialist Labor Party. The Bolsheviks prevented a true "All-Russian Jewish Congress" from ever being held, 36 but before their takeover, in the spring of 1 9 1 7, the two biggest Jewish par- ties held their own separate "All-Russian Jewish Con- gresses" and rapidly expanded their organizations country-wide. Their programs and measures were charac- terized by extraordinary radicalism and included plans for all of Russia with its multi-ethnic citizens. If the development of Jewish cultural life and of the Jewish press corresponded to their new liberties and op- portunities, there were still some transformations that as- tonished even Solzhenitsyn. Thus, for example, the opening up of military officer careers to Jews ended up, as Solzhenitsyn says, "more or less a mass promotion of young Jews as officers." 37 When Lenin returned to Russia from Switzerland in a sealed German train with 30 other Bolsheviks, followed by 160 more of them with the Nathanson-Marov-Zeder- baum group, predominantly Jews, nearly all of them later would occupy prominent positions with the Bolshevik government. 38 "In far greater numbers, by the hundreds, Jews poured from the United States into Russia, some of whom had 14 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2008 BARNESREVIEW.COM 1-877-773-9077 ORDERING emigrated a long time ago, others revolutionaries in exile or men who had fled Russian military service. Now they were naming themselves "revolutionary fighters" and "victims of czarism" as Solzhenitsyn put it. In this manner Leon Trotsky, one of the founders of the Red Army, showed up in Russia with numerous adherents, besides which he was in possession of a considerable sum of money, apparently from Wall Street Jews. He put the members of his group into prominent positions: into the Soviet trade unions, into the press (such as the party news- paper Pravda), into the central bank, and as commissars; the erstwhile house painter in America, Gomberg-Sorin, even became the chairman of the Petrograd [St. Peters- burg] Revolutionary Tribunal. 39 Countless Jewish returnees from London also "joined the action with enthusiasm," as Solzhenitsyn puts it. Solzhenitsyn recounts some of the famous names, their state functions and often frightening misdeeds. 40 ♦ The Red Terror The February Revolution in 1917 was seen by the truly radical revolutionaries (the "Bolsheviks") only as a preparatory phase for the removal of all past socio-economic and cultural structures, not only in Russia but, in principle, in all countries of the world. The engagement of Russian Jews on behalf of a new state order that secured their previously ignored equal rights is certainly understandable. This applies also to cases where inflexible opponents of this objective would need to be vigorously brought around to the new viewpoint or driven from their positions of power. But comprehension ends when state slogans call for, and are actually converted into, programs of mass terror and where mass murder, torture and sadistic vengefulness in the style of the Old Testament are committed while giv- ing simultaneous privileges to their perpetrators. Such have nothing to do with humanity and progress. But it was precisely this fusion of the communist program with the brutal and sadistic zeal of foreign high-level leaders that marked the revolution, the civil war and the subsequent years from 1917 up until the death of Stalin on March 5, 1953. Solzhenitsyn confirms, with an abundance of specific examples, that those things of which the Bolsheviks were accused — namely the Red Terror of the revolution, the civil war years and subsequent waves of purges, during FELIX DZERZHINSKY: THE POLISH ASSASSIN Felix E. Dzerzhinsky (Polish), a former convict, sinister Cheka boss and People's Commissar of the Interior, set up "mobile revolutionary tribunals" in 1921 in Siberia in order to rapidly sentence farmers to death who refused to turn over their crops to the Bolshevik state. His "confiscation orgies" con- tributed to the famine of the civil war. One of the archi- tects of the Red Terror, from 1924 until his death in 1926, he was the People's Com- missar for Railroads. In the first five years that he ran the Cheka/GPU, this agency ad- mitted that 1 .86 million "class enemies" were "liquidated," among them 6,000 teachers and professors, 8,800 physi- cians, 1 ,200 clergy, 5,400 mil- itary officers, 260,000 sergeants and lower ranks, 105,000 police officers, 48,000 police officers, 12,800 officials, 350,000 intellectuals, 192,000 workers and 815,000 farmers. Many researchers agree, however, on a figure of more than 10 million victims of the civil war. TBR P.O. BOX 15877 • WASHINGTON, D.C. 20003 THE BARNES REVIEW 15 the induced famines caused by the collectivization of agriculture and the incessant food confiscations across the countryside — were just as little a slanderous inven- tion of evil "class enemies" or "counter-revolutionaries" as was the unusually high percentage of prominent Jews carrying out the brutal orders of the party, state, secret services and military. As early as July 27, 1 9 1 8, Lenin decreed a law privileg- ing Jews; making all "active anti-Semites" outlaws, to be shot — in plain language, to be exterminated like vermin because of mere "agitation," without having actually de- prived anyone of his human rights. 41 Solzhenitsyn remembers, "The law encouraged every Jew who had been insulted as a Jew to request prosecu- tion." 42 [Today, this attitude is called "political correct- ness." — Ed.] This fact is something that Solzhenitsyn brings up in a rather reserved way. In reality, how- ever, one specific group of citizens was authorized to arbitrarily request the arrest and trial of anyone for all kinds of trivial or predatory reasons, and their liquidation. The general population had no possibility even to defend itself, for that would be death- bringing "agitation." Subsequent articles of penal law provided that propaganda or agitation promoters who "stir up national and religious enmity or ethnic hatred" — which could include any critical word about the party, government or administration — receive banishment for many years or a firing squad. [Solzhenit- syn received eight years in prison, then with no warning three more years of banishment in Kazakhstan — Ed.] Merely the possession of "agitational" literature or the suspicion of an anti-Semitic attitude could be equated with political crimes. Even a presumption sufficed for punish- ment. Here is an example of the effect of this law: In 1929 a certain I. Silberman deplored in the weekly newspaper of the Soviet legal system (issue no. 4) that in the People's Courts of the Moscow city government too few trials had occurred over anti-Semitism, and in fact only 34 in all of Moscow. (This means that every 10 days a trial took place somewhere in Moscow because of anti- Semitism.) The articles in this magazine of the People's Commis- sariat had the effect of an official order for its readers, which must be kept in mind. 43 The general expropriation of the entire population in favor of an illusory "people's property," the system of gen- eral terror, the pervasive vulnerability of every unprivi- leged citizen — and as their consequence, arrests without measure, deportations into faraway hard labor camp-re- gions and liquidations — were an integrated and mandatory part of the state ideology of "Marxism-Leninism." These historical facts must be acknowledged. The Red Terror had begun at the end of 1 9 1 7; however it was proclaimed official policy by Lenin only on Sep- tember 5,1918. This Red Terror, particularly with the help of the Cheka, whose execution excesses hurled the entire population across a vast Russia into constant anxiety and paroxysms of fright, characterized all periods of Bolshe- vism and permeated all its organizational structures. But early on, terrible details concerning this terror came to the attention of the whole world public. Solzhen- itsyn tells us: "The Red Terror, whose execution excesses hurled the entire population of Russia into constant anxiety and paroxysms of fright, characterized all periods of Bolshevism. " As early as January 1918 there were al- ready mass executions under martial law without any procedures or court hearings. These were followed by hundreds and later thousands of innocent hostages being seized, executed in mass nighttime shoot- ings or loaded on ships and sunk with them [aboard]. 44 There was no place [in the RSFSR, the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic, i.e. the huge Russian part of the Soviet Union], where shooting did not take place. By means of one verbal instruction [that of Cheka head FE. Dzerzhinsky] many thousands of humans were condemned to immediate death. 45 Dzerzhinsky stated in a June 1918 press conference: We openly advocate organized terror. . . . Terror, in times of revolution, is an absolute necessity. . . . The Cheka is obligated to defend the Revolution and destroy the op- ponent, even if the sword sometimes touches the heads of the innocent." 46 [Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky (1877- 1926) was a wayward Polish aristocrat and hardened Marxist revolutionary.] In the bulletin Red Terror of November 1, 1918, and then again in the Christmas Day 1918 issue of Pravda, Lenin and Dzerzhinsky published without shame their pro- letarian principles, which they also implemented every- where in Russia. Solzhenitsyn paraphrases: 16 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2008 BARNESREVIEW.COM 1-877-773-9077 ORDERING I r~t- * — v it K B£# I < •'"f/m BRUTAL FORCED RELOCATIONS Farmers resisting the robbery of their food and seed for the follow- ing year by the requisition commandos of the GPU and the Red Army fled from them into the forests. The Bolsheviks had no scruples about burning both their villages and their forests. Here several photos are shown of refugees from Bolshevik terror and victims of mass deporta- tion. The woman at upper right is from Ukraine. "Do not search in your investigations for documents and evidence that the accused in word or deed has acted against Soviet power. The first question you must pose is: to which class does he belong, what is his origin, what ed- ucation and training has he enjoyed, and what is his occu- pation? Those are the questions that must determine the fate of the accused. 47 This terror was a system of rule by approved mass mur- der. It took on dimensions never before seen. Referring to various Jewish and Russian authors, Solzhenitsyn states with respect to September 1918: Among the national minorities, it is completely clear that in an organization containing many Latvians, and a considerable number of Poles, the Jews stand out very dis- tinctly, particularly among the responsible persons and ac- tive collaborators in the Cheka, among the commissars and the investigators. For example, of the lead investigators in the commis- sariat for fighting counter-revolution, the most important structure in the whole Cheka, half were Jews. 48 Solzhenitsyn describes some details: A bloody track of vengeful terror — exclusively venge- ful! — went through the land. It was no longer about civil war, but instead about the destruction of the beaten oppo- nent. In waves the country was hit by raids, searches, new raids and arrests. Prison inmates were taken out, cell by cell, and shot from the first to the last man with machine- gun salvos, since there were too many victims to execute with single rifle shots Fifteen- or 16-year-olds were ex- ecuted, just as were 60-year-old men. 49 With the infamous decree "On the Red Terror" of Sep- tember 5, 1918, the Bolshevik regime demanded the rein- forcement of the Cheka and legalized the Terror officially — for example, the arbitrary banishing into concentration camps, or shooting, of all "class enemies." In that month of September alone, hundreds of executions occurred in each of Petrograd, Kronstadt and Moscow. In the autumn of 1 9 1 8 the newspapers of the country reported thousands of arrests and between 10,000 and 15,000 executions. 50 Even in the CC [Central Committee] of the Bolsheviks, protests were heard against the self-willed actions of the over-zealous Cheka, as Solzhenitsyn puts it, "an organiza- tion full of criminals, sadists and the degenerate scum of society." 51 TBR P.O. BOX 15877 • WASHINGTON, D.C. 20003 THE BARNES REVIEW 17 In one of innumerable letters of complaint found in the archives of the CC, there is one by a Bolshevik functionary denouncing "the blood orgies of Cheka squads" and their degeneracy It specifies: In this organization contaminated by criminality, vio- lence and arbitrariness, where rogues and criminals set the tone, men armed to the teeth execute anyone who does not please them. They invade homes, they plunder, rape, arrest people, pass counterfeit money and demand jugs of wine from terrified householders — and then extort from the people who just gave them wine 10-20 times the value of what they have already stolen to let them alone. 52 On January 24, 1919 the Bolshevik CC decided "to ex- terminate" as a "class enemy" an entire group of people: the Cossacks of the Don Valley and Kuban area near the Black Sea. In the now accessible text of the secret resolution we read: After the experiences in the civil war against the Cossacks one must grant that the merciless fight and massive terror against the rich Cos- sacks, who are to be exterminated to the last man and be physically destroyed, is the only politically correct [Note use of term. — Ed.] measure. In fact, as ad- mitted in July of 1919 by Rheingold, who was tasked as chairman of the Revolutionary Committee with the imple- mentation of the "Bolshevik Command" in the Cossack region, "we tended toward a policy of wanting to com- pletely exterminate the Cossacks without any differentia- tion. In the few weeks between mid-February and the end of March 1919, Bolshevik special units executed more than 8,000 Cossacks. In each Cossack area, "Revolution- ary Tribunals" operating under martial law passed out cap- ital sentences on long lists of suspects after deliberations of a few minutes each — usually for counterrevolutionary behavior. 53 Cheka chairman Dzerzhinsky set up special task forces for military security and, on March 16, 1919, he was named People's Commissar of the Interior. Revolts by workers, soldiers and farmers — a result of rural food con- fiscations — were smashed with the most brutal measures. Just in March-April 1919 between 3,000 and 5,000 hu- mans were executed in Tula and the city of Astrakhan near "One must grant that the merciless fight and massive terror against the rich Cossacks, who are to be exterminated to the last man, is the only politically correct measure. " the Volga. Here Solzhenitsyn describes it: Hundreds [of victims] with stones hung around their necks were marched onto barges and thrown into the Volga. Between the 12th and 14th of March, 1919 [the Cheka] shot and drowned between 2,000 and 4,000 work- ers and "mutineers." Starting on the 15th, repression also hit the bourgeoisie of the city. They supposedly had in- spired the resistance by the "White Guard" [anti-Bolshe- viks— Ed.]. 54 There were, however, many different kinds of assign- ments for the Cheka: in 1919 over 3 million Red Army sol- diers took along their weapons and deserted into the forests. About 500,000 were caught. The Cheka arranged not to only shoot thousands, but to arrest and deport their relatives as hostages. Whole villages were burned down. The Black Book of Communism enumerates on page 121 the thousands killed in individual cities of south Rus- sia by the Cheka in the year 1919. This "new morality" was described by the Kiev [Ukraine] Cheka in its newspaper Krasny Mech ("Red Sword") of August 18, 1919: We reject the old systems of morality and humanity. They were invented by the bourgeoisie to suppress and exploit the lower classes. Our morality is without previous models, and our hu- manity absolute, because it is based on a new ideal: to destroy any form of oppression and force. . . . For us everything is permitted, because we are first in the world to raise the sword, not for suppression and enslavement, but to release humans from their chains Blood? May it may flow in rivers! Because only blood can transform the black banner of the piratical bourgeoisie into a red flag, the flag of the Revolution. Because only the final death of the old world can protect us permanently from the return of the jackals. 55 In a decree of May 12, 1920, Lenin, with his leadership team, approved all of this. 56 Against the terror and the radical requisitioning of grain and livestock and other plundering by Cheka special units, farmers fought back in hundreds of ferocious rebel- lions. A civil war lasting several years was the result. The suppressive methods of the Cheka became ever more brutal. The Black Book of Communism continues: SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2008 BARNESREVIEW.COM 1-877-773-9077 ORDERING "Hundreds of villages were burned down and 'bandits,' de- serters and hostages were put to death." 57 An announcement by the Cheka of October 1920 for the Kuban area [near the Black Sea] read: Cossack settlements and other localities that have given haven to the Whites or the Greens [insurgent farmer's as- sociations, whom the linguistic usage of the Bolsheviks otherwise called "bandits"] are being destroyed, whole adult populations shot and all property seized. After the retreat by [the White] General Peter Wrangel between October and December 1920, the Crimean Penin- sula was called the "All-Russian cemetery." (According to varying estimations between 120,000 and 150,000 human beings were shot.) In Sevastopol they not only shot, but also hanged and not dozens but hundreds. Nachim Avenue was decorated up and down with swinging corpses. . . . People were arrested on the street and executed on the spot without any procedure. The terror in the Crimea persisted right into the year 1921. 58 The Black Book of Communism goes on: "The Cos- sacks, once again on the side of the losers, were exposed anew to the Red Terror." The Latvian Karl Lander, one of the prominent lead- ers of the Cheka, was appointed as "commander of the northern Caucasus and the Don Valley Province." He in- troduced the "troikas," special three-judge courts as- signed to de-kulakization [farm collectivization]. Just in the month of October 1920 these troikas condemned more than 6,000 human beings to death. They were all immediately executed. Relatives of the condemned, and sometimes the neigh- bors of the "green partisans" [anti-Bolshevik peasants] and the Cossacks who had revolted against the regime, who had not previously been seized, were now systematically kidnapped as hostages and put into concentration camps, into true death camps, as Martin Latsis, boss of the Ukrain- ian Cheka, admitted in one of his reports: The hostages — women, children and old people — were driven together in a camp near Maikop [a city on the north- ern edge of the Caucasus Mountains] and vegetated there under the most terrible conditions in the mud and in the October cold. . . . They died like flies." 59 In view of the famine Bolshevik terror had caused in al- most all parts of Russia, Lenin ordered the introduction in March 1921 of his "New Economic Policy" (NEP) with private property and businesses for the farmers. But the arbitrary rule by the Cheka was not terminated. VLADIMIR LENIN The German general staff executed in 1917 its ill-conceived scheme to win the war by injecting Vladimir Lenin— with the ultimate in unforeseen consequences for the German nation and the entire West— into czarist Russia. The Reichsbahn brought him in a sealed train from Switzerland, with other Bol- sheviks, across Germany to the Baltic. Then they took a ferry to Sweden and from there entered Finland (then still part of the Russian Empire, but German-occupied) to get into Russia. The bald Lenin disguised himself— with wig and without beard— as "Vilen." Was this a pun by Lenin on the word "vil- lain"? Or was it in reference to the concept of "serf" or "peas- ant," as the root of the word implies? "Lenin's Hanging Order" documents that Lenin himself ordered terror. The text is as follows: "Send [this telegram] to Penza [a picturesque city near the Volga River] to Comrades Kurayev, Bosh, Minkin and other Penza communists. Comrades! The revolt by the five kulak [free peasant] counties must be suppressed without mercy. The interests of the entire revolution demand this, be- cause before us now is our final decisive battle with the ku- laks. We need to set an example. 1 ) You need to hang (and hang without fail, so that the public sees) at least 100 notori- ous kulaks, rich people and other bloodsuckers. 2) Publish their names. 3) Take away all of their grain. 4) Execute the hostages— in accordance with yesterday's telegram. This needs to be accomplished in such a way that people for hun- dreds of miles around will see, tremble, know— and scream out: 'Let's choke and strangle those bloodsucking kulaks.' Telegraph us acknowledging receipt and implementation of this. Yours, Lenin. PS. Use your toughest people for this." TBR P.O. BOX 15877 • WASHINGTON, D.C. 20003 THE BARNES REVIEW 19 The Black Book of Communism further notes: Cheka head Felix Dzerzhinsky, named on March 16, 1919 as People's Commissar of the Interior, appeared as a plenipotentiary in Siberia in December 1921 to exact taxes and food from the locals. He sent out "roving revolution- ary tribunals" through the villages in order to condemn anyone, in instant proceedings, to prison, concentration camp or death who did not surrender whatever the tri- bunals demanded. Concerning their excessive encroach- ments, an "inspektor" from Omsk complained on Feb. 14, 1922: "The encroachments of these confiscation comman- dos have reached an inconceivable extent. Systematically, the arrested farmers are locked into unheated stockrooms, subjected to the whip and threatened with execution. Those who have not completely fulfilled their delivery quota are bound and marched naked down the main streets of the villages. Then they are shut up in an unheated stockroom. Many women have been beaten, struck into un- consciousness. They are being pushed naked into snow pits." 60 Despite the bad harvest of 1920, that year saw 10 million pud [180,000 tons] of food seized. The entire food supply, including seed for the next harvest, was confis- cated. By January 1921 many farmers already had nothing more to eat and by February the death rate had already begun to rise. According to reports by the Cheka and the military in- formation service the famine had spread by 1919 to many regions. During the year 1920 the situation worsened more and more. . . . For the little people it was obvious that Soviet power wanted every farmer who dared oppose them to starve. 61 Solzhenitsyn asks the question: "How is it to be ex- plained that the population of Russia, taken altogether, re- garded all this as 'the Jewish terror'"? 62 He points to the persons in responsibility during the grain requisitioning, the crushing of the farmer rebellions, the mass murders of the Cossacks, the shooting of prison inmates in Kiev — "the best of the Russians." 63 He refers to Jewish Chekists at the top [Vol. I, Russian Jewish History: 1795-1916, p. 140], and quotes from a document about the Cheka in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev: "Those who have not fulfilled their delivery quota are bound and marched naked down the main streets of the villages. Then they are shut up in an unheated stockroom. They are pushed naked into snow pits. " The number of the Chekists varies between 150 and 300. .. . The proportional relationship of Jewish to other Cheka personnel was 3 to 1, while the leading positions were in Jewish hands (14 of 20). Solzhenitsyn quotes the slogan of a worker strike in Moscow from February 1921: "Down with the commu- nists and the Jews!" Then Solzhenitsyn supplies the answer to his own question: "It seemed as if not only the Bolshevik Jews had chosen their side in the civil war, the Red side, but appar- ently all of Jewry." 64 Not only in the beginnings with the Cheka and the GPU (Felix Dzerzhinsky, then 1920-1924 G. Yagoda), but later in 1934 with the NKVD (People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs of Yagoda, Yeshov and Beria), Jews gained "an in- creasing role in the apparatus," 65 in- cluding also their foreign (espionage) departments. Solzhenitsyn proves this with numerous names. 66 Solzhenitsyn does not omit Lenin's continuing endorsement of terror by as late as the year 1922: The national plague of "de-kulakiza- tion" left not just thousands — but millions — of farmers with neither a right to their residence nor even a right to their life. But Soviet writers — among them not a few Jews — expended not one syllable decrying this ice-cold destruction of the Russian peasantry. In this silence they were joined by the whole West. ... [In the West, Jewish control of the press and Hollywood was — and still is — nearly total. — Ed.] This benevolent commentary is taken from Life maga- zine of July 14, 1941, one month after the beginning of Germany's Russian campaign and during the continuing American support for the USSR. In Stuart Kahan's biography of his uncle we read some- thing different: As Stalin's brother-in-law and closest collaborator, he was one of the most powerful and dangerous men in the world, an executioner with the blood of 20 million people sticking to his hand. He also organized the gruesome per- secution of his own ethnic group in Stalin's kingdom. [Lazar Kaganovich "was responsible for the death of an entire generation of intellectuals and the personal signer of execution orders for 36,000 people. — Ed.] 67 20 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2008 BARNESREVIEW.COM 1-877-773-9077 ORDERING Solzhenitsyn adds: Fifteen million, declared non- citizens as "enemies of the state," were not merely robbed of such things as the chance to study, the right to obtain a doctorate, or eli- gibility to work for the state, but their farms were ruined and they were shoved together like cattle and deported to their destruction in the taiga and the tundra. Among the fanaticized urban activists streaming out into the countryside were Jews, enthusiastically carry- ing out the collectivization of agri- culture and leaving behind visible and terrible memories. . . . 68 The prevailing mentality (of the mob) was described by "historian" Wassili Grossman, whose bias is ap- parent when he writes: They are insane, under a spell, they threaten with guns, call the children "kulak bitches' brood," scream "bloodsuckers"-the fe- male is lower than a louse, they view these humans whom they are about to "de-kulakize" as cattle, pigs — everything is revolting about kulaks — they have no individuality, no soul — the kulaks stink and have venereal disease but mostly they are "enemies of the people" who exploit others. And from the Black Book of Communism'. Within a few years, from 1928 to 1931, 138,000 civil servants were removed from public service. Of them, 23,000 were classified under "Category I," "enemies of Soviet power," and lost their civil rights From January 1930 to June 193 1, 48% of the engineers in the Donets re- gion were dismissed or arrested; in the transportation sec- tor alone, 4,500 "sabotage specialists" were "exposed." A decree of December 12, 1930 enumerated more than 30 categories of people from whom citizenship rights were withdrawn: "former landowners, former traders, former nobles, former policemen, officials who worked under the LAVRENTY BERIA Lavrenty Pavlov Beria, by 1921 already in his young years a feared and prominent perpe- trator in the GPU in the merciless crushing of countless rebellions by workers, soldiers and farmers (also in his native Georgia), was from 1931 until 1936 First Party Secretary in Trans- caucasia and Georgia. In 1934 he became a member of the CC (Central Committee) and in 1938 People's Commissar of the NKVD. He is considered responsible for the shooting of over 1 5,000 Polish officers held prisoner in April-May 1940 in the forest of Katyn and two other places. In 1945 he became marshal of the Soviet Union and in 1946 deputy prime minister and a member of the Politburo. After Stalin's death, he was shot as a traitor on Dec. 23, 1953. czars, former kulaks, former lessors or owners of private enterprises, former of- ficers of the White Army, clergymen, monks and nuns, former members of the political parties" etc. 69 Including their family members, about 7 million human beings were affected by this, losing not only the right to vote but also their right to an apartment, to medications, to food rations and, after passage of a new "internal passport" law, the right to move to another place. After the law of August 7, 1932 was issued, "for each theft or waste of socialist property" — such as the gathering of ears of corn from al- ready harvested fields — merely be- tween August 1932 and December 1933, more than 125,000 humans were convicted, and of them 5,400 were condemned to death. 70 And from Solzhenitsyn's The Jews in the Soviet Union: The number of farmers who flooded into Soviet cities fleeing from collec- tivization and "de-kulakization" be- tween 1928 and 1932 has been esti- mated at some 12 million. 71 Lazar Kaganovich, Genrikh Yagoda and Vyacheslav Molotov pushed their requisition commandos out into the countryside. Soon thereafter, in 1932-33, 5 or 6 million humans died like animals of hunger in Russia and Ukraine, right on the edge of Europe. "But the free press of the free world maintained its perfect silence! 72 A not inconsiderable number of Jewish communists had made themselves lords of life and death over the coun- tryside. It should surprise no one that this has stuck in the memory of those millions affected throughout the Ukraine, the Volga and Urals areas of Russia, on the Crimean Penin- sula and elsewhere in Russia. Solzhenitsyn's The Jews in the Soviet Union explains: Yet another colleague of many years' duration of NY. Yeshov [appointed people's commissar of the interior in September 1936] was Isaac Shapiro. He functioned after TBR P.O. BOX 15877 • WASHINGTON, D.C. 20003 THE BARNES REVIEW 21 1934 as Yeshov's adviser, then as the director of the NKVD secretariat, then as head of the "Special Section" of the GUGB (another infamous part of the state security appa- ratus). In December 1936, of the 10 directors of the Soviet agencies for state security marked with code numbers, seven are Jews. 73 Solzhenitsyn also enumerates the Jewish names direct- ing the "National Camp Administration" (Gulag): Yes, there too there was a large portion of Jews. The photo portraits I have reproduced from the Soviets' own self-congratulatory book of 1936 [shown in The GULAG Archipelago] of the leadership of the White Sea-Baltic Sea Canal project have provoked much outrage; it is said I had selected only Jewish faces. But I made no selections. I simply ran the photographs of all the highest directors of the White Sea-Baltic Sea labor camp from this immortal work. Whose choice and whose guilt is it if all were Jews? 74 Solzhenitsyn dug out many more names and stressed in his book that this camp administrative machinery stayed hidden from the public, be- cause of (among other reasons) con- stant transfers of personnel, in spite of incredible distances across the USSR. Therefore, only after the collapse of Soviet rule in 1990 could the personnel situation gradually and fragmentarily be clarified. However, this is his con- clusion: Among these regional rulers ["district" and "regional" authorities of the GPU and the NKVD], there were still many Jews throughout the entire 1930s who decided ques- tions of life or death for each inhabitant. 75 The GPU and/or NKVD also disposed of special mil- itary units, including artillery, tanks and air squadrons, and in addition their own troops watching the borders and the railroads; others conducted the transports of forced labor- ers and guarded forced labor colonies. Beyond even that, these security agencies maintained their own special sub- units within all Red Army units above battalion strength and within the military academies. Regarding the methods of Red terror, Solzhenitsyn refers to two cases that recently have again become known: a) The poison-injecting professor Gregory Mayra- "Over the course of the trip, the gases were conducted into the back compartment of the truck in such a way that upon arrival at the shooting ditch, those arrested were already taken care of " novsky, to whose "NKVD Laboratory X," beginning in 1937 (with "X" being the "special department for opera- tional technology") those "condemned to death for exper- imental purposes" were supplied. Each door of the five cells for experiments on humans had a peephole with a magnifying lens. 76 In 1951 he was arrested, but not for his crimes; instead it was because of what he knew. b) The "poison gas wagons" that were the "invention" of Isaiah Davidovich Berg in 1936, and which were put into active service by the NKVD. Solzhenitsyn details this in his The Jews in the Soviet Union: Berg was the director of the economics department of the NKVD in the Moscow area. Here one can see how im- portant it is to also know about those who did not sit in the highest positions at all. . . . Berg transported (as ordered) people for shooting. But when, in the Moscow area three "troikas" of death-sen- tences became busy at the same time, the work began to overwhelm the shooting squads. Then the idea occurred to some- one to strip the victims, bind and gag them, and throw them into a closed truck, which was camouflaged as a bread deliv- ery van. Over the course of the trip . . . gases were conducted into the back com- partment of the truck in such a way that upon arrival at the shooting ditch, those arrested were al- ready "taken care of." Let it be noted that Berg was shot himself shortly there- after, in 1939 — not because of these monstrosities, but in- stead after an indictment for "conspiracy." In 1956 ... he was rehabilitated, although at that time the history of his invention of said toxic gas wagons was clearly noted in his file — a notation that has stayed in there right up to our times, when it was discovered by journalists. 77 After the Soviet occupation of the Baltic in the year 1940, one Kaplan, as the NKVD boss of the Duena area, ravaged it so much that, Solzhenitsyn says, "in 1941, right after the departure of the [retreating] Soviet troops and even before the Germans arrived, the rage of the popula- tion unloaded itself against the Jews like an explosion. 75 For the "Red Terror," The Black Book of Communism draws up the following balance, whose figures, in relation to numerous other estimations, are "starkly reduced": "In the years 1919 and 1920 the Red Terror in Russia either 22 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2008 BARNESREVIEW.COM 1-877-773-9077 ORDERING - r^w-* 9- Stalin's 'Work to Death' Camps Make no mistake about the gulags: they were not "work forever" camps. They were "work to death" camps, designed to liquidate the occupants. Millions were sent to die in them. At left, top to bottom: 1.) Workers labor by hand in sub-zero temperatures somewhere in the gulag. Life for many was short in the camps. 2.) A man wields a sledge hammer as another holds a spike as a crew works on a railroad bridge. 3.) A long line of workers is shown stretching almost to the horizon. They are working laying railroad tracks through a particularly remote area of Russia. Above, inmates worked in bitter conditions. Here a man pushes a wheelbarrow laden with rocks through a dense ice fog. murdered or deported between 300,000 and 500,000 vic- tims/' 79 This number includes those massacred by the Bolshe- viks during the overwhelming of the White Army of Gen- eral Wrangel on the Crimea around the end of October 1920. By the end of December, just in this one region the Bolsheviks murdered approximately 50,000 civilians. 80 The number Solzhenitsyn specifies of 120,000 to 150,000 total victims, including those of the "de-Cossack- ization" of the Don, Caucasus and Kuban areas, signifies only those human beings actually killed. 81 But what is not considered in arriving at these numbers are conditions — such as starvation, cold and disease — caused by the Bolsheviks during the civil war, which them- selves caused the death, according to Stuart Kahan, the Jewish nephew of Lazar Kaganovich, of approximately 9 million human beings. 82 As a consequence of the Bolshevik agricultural policy and the resulting civil war, in particular in the Volga area, central Russia and Siberia, about 5 million humans suc- cumbed to a horrific food crisis in 1921 and 1922. 83 Of the 30 million human beings in the hunger area, many were saved only by foreign assistance. Just in the few days between August 29 and September 5, 1924, the Cheka shot 12,578 human beings. 84 There is no record of any Jews having been shot. In place of a still-lacking total figure for Cheka mur- ders in connection with the "de-kulakization campaign," it- self a part of the obligatory collectivization phase of 1927-1930, there exists a confidential GPU report of Feb. 15, 1930 sent to the people's commissar of the interior at that time, Genrikh Yagoda. By discussing the execution of his Order No. 44/21, it reveals to us the language used at the time and the methods of Bolshevik state terror. The re- port proudly states: As for the liquidations — both individuals taken out of circulation and mass operations — we arrive at a total figure of 64,589. In the preparatory measures, there were 52,166 liquidations (those of individuals), and 12,423 through mass operations. In just a few days our "production quota" was exceeded, i.e., 60,000 kulaks of the first category. Solzhenitsyn says they were targeted for "counterrev- TBR P.O. BOX 15877 • WASHINGTON, D.C. 20003 THE BARNES REVIEW 23 olutionary activity and for being farmers who owned prop- erty." 85 Against Jews there were no Cheka pogroms. And from The Black Book of Communism: From February 1930 to December 1931, more than 1,800,000 de-kulakized persons [farmers stripped of their farms] were deported to camps. When on January 1, 1932 the authorities carried out their first major head-count, only 1,317,022 persons were registered. The loss was thus about one-half million The number of those who succeeded in escaping was surely high. . . . Starting in the summer of 193 1 the GPU bore exclu- sive responsibility for the deportees, who were now called "special colonists." ... For 1932 the Gulag administration re- ported the arrival of 71,236 new deportees, and for 1933 an influx of 268,091 new special settlers was registered In 1933, the year of the Great Famine, the authorities an- nounced 151,601 deaths from among the 1,142,022 special colonists. 86 The farm collectivization, the "de- kulakization," the requisitioning raids, the stripping of citizenship rights and the sudden flight of 12 million rural inhabitants into the cities, which in- cluded the planned famine disasters from Ukraine to Kazakhstan, cost at least 6 million human lives. That did not prevent the Soviet leadership from spreading a mantle of silence over this crime and at the same time, in order to have funds for the purchase of foreign industrial goods, from exporting 1.8 million metric tons of wheat. 87 According to official investigations which Nikita Khrushchev successfully urged at the XXIInd Party Con- gress in 1958, just in 1937-1938 the NKVD arrested 1,575,000 persons. Of these, 1,345,000 were condemned, and of these, 681,692 were executed. 88 In reality the death number was very much higher; through malnutrition and physical weakening in the Gulag camps, the death rate be- came 10 times that of the shooting rate. 89 We learn just from the minutes of a meeting of the Politburo of Feb. 17, 1938 the following: The NKVD in Ukraine is hereby permitted to arrest an additional number of kulaks and other anti-Soviet ele- ments and to have the matter handled by the troikas. The NKVD contingent in the Ukrainian SSR is hereby also in- creased to 30,000. 90 "The sudden forced flight of 12 million rural inhabitants into the cities, which included the planned famine disasters from Ukraine to Kazakhstan, cost at least 6 million human lives. " This repression also victimized 35,020 military offi- cers, up into the highest ranks of the Red Army. The total number of executed officers is still not known; some of those arrested were only removed from the Red Army, and of them some were later reused during the war. Three of the five field marshals were sentenced to death, as were 13 of the 15 army generals, 8 of the 9 admirals, 50 of the 57 commanding generals, 154 of the 186 division generals, and as for the [political] commissars, all 16 army commis- sars and 25 of the 28 commissars of army corps were ex- ecuted. 91 These "cleansing waves" crashed over not only the party but even one-third of the people's commissars and half the deputy ministers. 92 Just as affected were business- men, the intelligentsia and many others. Researchers in KGB files have found 383 central lists with 44,000 names on them, to which 39,000 notations "dead" are attached, 93 the result of quick work by "troikas" consisting of district attorneys, NKVD and police chiefs who con- demned people to death according to quotas they had to meet. 94 "The scum that has seeped into the organs of state security" was an expression by the NKVD's new boss, N. Yeshov, who followed his own victims into death by bullet two years later, in 1938, as did approximately 21,000 other scum. "95 Confirmed deaths: 300,000 in the camps between 1934 and 1940; by considering the years 1930-33, for which there are no exact numbers, there were probably 400,000 deaths for the entire decade. To this figure we must add approximately 600,000 more who perished en route during the deportation. 96 A total of 7 million human beings were delivered to the Gulag's camps and work colonies during the years 1934- 1941. For the years 1930-1933, no exact numbers are known. 97 On Jan. 1, 1940 there were 1,670,000 prisoners in the 53 "labor camps for reeducation" and in the 425 "work colonies for reeducation." One year later there were 1,930,000. In the prisons about 200,000 human beings awaited their conviction or transportation into a camp. 98 The difference between 7 and 1 .65 million prisoners is not explained. It likely is composed of the deceased, re- leased prisoners, escapees and denizens of yet further camps and "those deported beyond the camp fences," who were assigned to hard labor as "special settlers," as 24 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2008 BARNESREVIEW.COM 1-877-773-9077 ORDERING The Katyn Forest Massacres In April 1943 in the forest by Katyn, close to Smolensk, the mass graves of over 4,500 Polish officers, murdered with a shot to the nape of the neck, were shown to the interna- tional public. It was one of three crime scenes. At the other two, over 10,000 more Polish officers had been likewise murdered at the same time. These two sites were only dis- covered after the end of the war. The Western ruling powers knew that all traces of these of- ficers in the Soviet camps Kosielsk, Staro- bielsk and Ostashkov had been lost since April-May 1940, and that the mass murderers were their Soviet allies. Nevertheless the guilty parties participated in the horror-show of the "Soviet Commission of Inquiry" that was created one year later by the Soviets and lasted beyond the Nuremberg "War Crimes" Trials of 1946, and charged the Germans with this mass crime, ignoring all the proof that had been available in abundance since 1943. Solzhenitsyn referred to them. There were twice as many as these — or even many more." Yet uncounted in all of this are the half- free roaming vagabond prisoners. "The 1,800 Kommandanturas of the NKVD adminis- tered more than 1,200,000 "special settlers." 100 In two other historical investigations the judgment of Stalin's "worker and peasant paradise" is as follows: a) "A conservative estimate of the number of arrests in the years 1937 and 1938 is about 7 million and, if one as- sumes that in early 1937 5 million were behind bars or barbed wire, by the end of 1 939 one would arrive at a total number of 12 million had there not been shootings, starva- tions and death by exhaustion. About 2 million will have died off during their detention — and about 10% of the ar- rested 5 million or more were shot each year, which for 1937-1938 would produce the figure of around 1 million killed by bullets. As we are told by Ronald Hingley in The Russian Secret Police 1565-1970: "By this calculation, at the end of 1938 there must have been about 9 million humans in detention, of them 8 million in concentration camps and over 1 million in various prisons." 101 b) "Thus, over the period of obligatory collectivization beginning in 1929 and the carefully planned and organized hunger holocaust of 1932-1933 that worsened it, and the concealed genocide of the Ukrainian people, various esti- mates and demographic investigations agree that between 7 million and 10 million human beings were eliminated. The mass shootings of so-called 'people's enemies' that began in the early 1930s and culminated in the hysteria of the 'Great Purge' of 1937-1939, robbed yet another 5 to 7 million human beings of their life. According to Joachim Hoffman, "and about another 1 million people died as a result of the annexation of eastern Poland and the Baltic republics between 1939 and 1941 ." 102 Hoffman adds, "The mortality rate stayed enormous in the 80 big concentration camp complexes and the "hun- dreds of single camps." Just in the concentration camp of Kolyma [in far northeastern Siberia], at least 3 million human beings perished from the terrible living conditions and temperatures as low as -60 degrees C." 103 A sum total of 40 million Bolshevik terror victims 1917-1941 is now generally considered realistic. Solzhenitsyn tells us, however, '"by the computations of the emigrated statistics professor Kurganov, this 'relatively light' suppression that ran from the beginning of the Oc- tober Revolution through 1950 cost us [Russians] about 66 million human lives." [GULAG Archipelago, p. 37] "In the year 1939 there were 8.5 million Soviet citizens, or 9% of the adult population of the USSR in concentra- tion camps and prisons." 104 "This can be said with certainty: on the eve of the war with Germany (1941), 20% of the work performed in the Soviet Union was forced labor." 105 ♦ TBR P.O. BOX 15877 • WASHINGTON, D.C. 20003 THE BARNES REVIEW 25 Pogroms in the Russian Civil War Solzhenitsyn does not stint on criticism of pogroms during the Russian civil war time, especially in Ukraine, which changed overlords several times (White Guardists, Ukrainian Independentists, the Kaiser's German troops and Bolsheviks). However, he cor- rects erroneous historical representations that claim that the pogroms provoked the subsequent acts of revenge by the Cheka: The sequence of events was exactly the opposite: The 80% [of the Cheka in 