From "Stalin: The History and Critique of a Black Legend"

Stalin in the Jewish “Court”, the Jews in Stalin’s “Court”

The USSR is the “country that saved the greatest number of Jews." This observation is from a journalist and researcher of Trotskyist orientation who, as a “witness of those years”, thought it necessary to stand against the campaign underway today in the West. He continues as follows: “no country had anything comparable to the Red Army, with Jews in the highest military positions." That’s not all: “One of Stalin’s sons marries a Jew, and his daughter does the same."767 It can be added that, within Stalin’s leadership group, Jews were well represented and at the highest levels until the very end. To remain standing, however weak and staggered, the theory of Stalin’s “antisemitism” requires the dejudification of the Jews who work closely with him. That’s precisely what happens. It’s true that “Yagoda, Kaganovich and many others in Russia and Central and Eastern Europe” played an important role alongside a ferocious dictator, but it’s a matter of “apostate Jews”: that’s the consideration from a Jewish intellectual, using language that clearly recalls the history of religions.768 Other times, the weight of religious tradition is noted in a more measured or involuntary way: there’s a journalist who denounces, in the most circulated Italian newspaper, the “renegade Jews in Stalin’s court."769

In reality, the rhetoric regarding “apostates” and “renegades” (or regarding “court Jews”) constituted an implicit negation of the accusation of antisemitism; antisemitism that, as a form of racism, is directed against an ethnic group regardless of the religious and political conduct of its individual members. To recognize the presence of Jews in leadership positions in Stalin’s USSR, and the socialist camp led by him, means admitting that in those countries access to power and social and political stature were determined not by their immutable racial background, but by their mutable political conduct. But the dejudification of Jews (as “apostate”, “renegades”, “court” or inauthentic Jews) who are today considered politically embarrassing allows the transformation of antisemitism into a category capable of resisting any negation arising from empirical analysis, and therefore it’s applicable not only to Stalin, but to the whole history of the Soviet Union.

Soon after the October Revolution, the campaign against obscurantism denounced within different religions (including Judaism) is carried out with the participation of important Jewish circles in leading positions. Here’s the commentary by the previously cited journalist from Corriere della Sera: “it was Yevektia, of the Jewish branch of the CPSU, who fomented the new antisemitism." 770 A professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem makes a similar argument: “during the Bolshevik revolution [...] many Jewish Bolsheviks were so dedicated to the cause of revolutionary Russian nationalism that they became anti-Semites."771 Already classified as “apostates” and “renegades”, the Jews of communist orientation now become “anti-Semitic” tout court. At this time, apart from Stalin, the accusation of “antisemitism” reaches Lenin himself, the supreme leader of these “anti-Semitic” campaigns.

Nevertheless, it’s the same Israeli historian just cited who writes: “Most likely, Lenin was always very skeptical of the organizational capacity of Russians. In one conversation with Gorky, he observes that there hadn’t been intelligent Russians who weren’t Jews, or at least had Jews among their ancestors and a little Jewish blood in their veins." The opinion of the Soviet leader is also the opinion of his interlocutor: “It would not have displeased Gorky if it had been Jews who had taken control over the Russian economy, and in 1916, he goes as far as writing that ‘the genius of Jews for their organization, their flexibility, and their indomitable energy must be taken properly into account in a country so poorly organized like our Russia’."772 Therefore, going by this text, Lenin and Gorky (who also adheres to the Communist Party), could eventually be accused of anti-Russian racism and not antisemitism.

The leading role played by Jews isn’t limited to the overthrow of the old regime in Russia. The Jewish historian continues as follows: Lenin attributes to the “omnipresent Jewish minority” the role of being the “guardians of communism." Therefore, “it wasn’t the Slavs, but the Jews that became the principal spearhead of the Russian advance in the international arena, and therefore against Europe and the rest of the world. Lenin showed great intuition in trusting the success of the revolution to them and other ethnic minorities."773 As one can see, “anti-Semitic” Jews make an important contribution, maybe even a decisive contribution, to the expansion of communism; the Judeo-Bolshevik plot that the Nazis speak of is here understood as the unrest or plot orchestrated by Jews, yes, but by anti-Semitic Jews!

It’s a matter of upheaval or a plot with a long, long history. Again according to the historian previously cited, Lenin would have used the Jews who had broken with their community of origin, just as Christianity had done earlier.774 And again emerge the similarities to the historical reading dear to Nazism, that had denounced the role of Jews in the destructive cycle that stretches from Christianity to Bolshevism. What’s new here is that the Jews who played that role, having adhered first to Christianity and later to Bolshevism, should ultimately be considered “apostates”, “renegades” and “anti-Semites." In trying to strike at the Soviet experience as a whole, together with Stalin, the accusation of antisemitism ends up reproducing, with some modest variations, the Nazi philosophy of history!