http://www.vdare.com/misc/051105_macdonald_stalin.htm



"Stalin's Willing Executioners"?

By Kevin MacDonald


Yuri Slezkine's book The Jewish Century, which appeared last year to
rapturous reviews, is an intellectual tour de force, alternately
muddled and brilliant, courageous and apologetic. Slezkine's greatest
accomplishment is to set the historical record straight on the
importance of Jews in the Bolshevik Revolution and its aftermath. He
summarizes previously available data and extends our understanding of
the Jewish role in revolutionary movements before 1917 and of Soviet
society thereafter. His book provides a fascinating chronicle of the
Jewish rise to elite status in all areas of Soviet society-culture,
the universities, professional occupations, the media, and government.
Indeed, the book is also probably the best, most up-to-date account of
Jewish economic and cultural pre-eminence in Europe (and America) that
we have.

The once-common view that the Bolshevik Revolution was a Jewish
revolution and that the Soviet Union was initially dominated by Jews
has now been largely eliminated from modern academic historiography.
The current view, accepted by almost all contemporary historians, is
that Jews played no special role in Bolshevism and indeed, were
uniquely victimized by it.

Slezkine's book provides a bracing corrective to this current view.

Slezkine himself is a Russian immigrant of partially Jewish extraction.
Arriving in America in 1983, he moved quickly into elite U.S. academic
circles and is now a professor at U.C. Berkeley. This, his second book,
is his first on a major theme.

While the greater part of The Jewish Century is an exposition of the
Russian experience, Slezkine provides what are in effect sidebars
(comparatively flimsy) recounting the Jewish experience in America and
the Middle East. Together, these phenomena can in fact be seen as the
three great Jewish migrations of the 20th century, since within Russia
millions of Jews left the shtetl towns of the Pale of Settlement,
migrating to Moscow and the other cities to man elite positions in the
Soviet state.

Slezkine attempts to understand Jewish history and the rise of Jews to
elite status in the 20th century by developing the thesis that the
peoples of the world can be classified into two groups.

The successful peoples of the modern world, termed Mercurians, are
urban, mobile, literate, articulate, and intellectually sophisticated.

The second group, termed Apollonians, is rooted to the land with
traditional agrarian cultures, valuing physical strength and warrior
virtues.

Since Slezkine sees Jews as the quintessential Mercurians,
modernization is essentially a process of everyone becoming Jewish.
Indeed, Slezkine regards both European individualism and the European
nation state as imitations of pre-existing Jewish
accomplishments-both deeply problematic views, in my opinion.

There are problems with the Mercurian/Apollonian distinction as well.
The Gypsies whom he offers as an example of another Mercurian people,
are basically the opposite of Jews: having a low-investment, low-IQ
reproductive style characterized by higher fertility, earlier onset of
reproduction, more unstable pair bonds, and more single parenting.

The Overseas Chinese, another proposed parallel, are indeed highly
intelligent and entrepreneurial, like the Jews. But I would argue the
aggressiveness of the Jews, compared to the relative political
passivity of the Overseas Chinese, invalidates the comparison.

We do not read of Chinese cultural movements dominating the major local
universities and media outlets, subjecting the traditional culture of
Southeast Asians and anti-Chinese sentiment to radical critique -or
of Chinese organizations campaigning for the removal of native cultural
and religious symbols from public places.

Moreover, the vast majority of Jews in Eastern Europe in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were hardly the modern
Mercurians that Slezkine portrays.

Well into the 20th century, as Slezkine himself notes, most Eastern
European Jews could not speak the languages of the non-Jews living
around them. Slezkine also ignores their medieval outlook on life,
their obsession with the Kabbala-the writings of Jewish
mystics-their superstition and anti-rationalism, and their belief in
magical remedies and exorcisms.

And these supposedly modern Mercurians had an attitude of absolute
faith in the person of the tsadik, their rebbe, who was a charismatic
figure seen by his followers literally as the personification of God in
the world.

Slezkine devotes one line to the fact that Jewish populations in
Eastern Europe had the highest rate of natural increase of any European
population in the nineteenth century. The grinding poverty that this
produced caused an upsurge of fundamentalist extremism that coalesced
in the Hasidic movement and, later in the nineteenth century, into
political radicalism and Zionism as solutions to Jewish problems.

By proposing the basically spurious Mercurian/Apollonian contrast,
Slezkine obscures the plain fact that Jewish history in the period he
discusses constitutes a spectacularly, arguably uniquely, successful
case of what I have described as an ethnocentric group competitive
strategy in action.

Slezkine conceptualizes Mercurianism as a worldview and therefore a
matter of psychological choice rather than a set of psychological
mechanisms, notably general intelligence and ethnocentrism. He appears
to be aware of the biological reality of kinship and ethnicity, but he
steadfastly pursues a cultural determinism model. As a result of this
false premise, he understates the power of ethnocentrism and group
competitiveness as unifying factors in Jewish history.

This competitiveness was of course notorious in Eastern Europe before
the 1917 revolution. Slezkine ignores, or at least does not spell out,
the extent to which Jews were willing agents of exploitative elites in
traditional societies, not only in Europe, but in the Muslim world as
well. Forming alliances with exploitative elites is arguably the most
reliably recurrent theme observable in Jewish economic behavior over
the ages.

Indeed, Slezkine shows that this pattern effectively continued in
Russia after the Revolution: Jews became part of a new exploitative
elite. But here boundaries between Jews and non-Jews were unusually
blurred-in traditional societies, barriers between Jews and non-Jews
at all social levels were always high.

Slezkine supposes that Jews and other Mercurians performed economic
tasks deemed inappropriate for the natives for religious reasons. But
this is only part of the story. Often these were situations where the
natives were simply comparatively less ruthless in exploiting their
fellows, which put them at a competitive disadvantage. This was
especially the case in Eastern Europe, where conducive economic
arrangements, such as tax farming, estate management, and monopolies on
retail liquor distribution, lasted far longer than in the West.

Slezkine also ignores the extent to which Jewish competition may have
suppressed - arguably sometimes reversed - the formation of a
native middle class in Eastern Europe. He seems instead to simply
assume the locals lacked the abilities required.

But the fact is that in most of Western Europe Jews were expelled in
the Middle Ages. And, as a result, when modernization occurred, it was
accomplished with an indigenous middle class. Perhaps the Christian
taxpayers of England made a good investment in their own future when
they agreed to pay King Edward I a massive tax of L116,346 in return
for expelling 2000 Jews in 1290. If, as in Eastern Europe, Jews had won
the economic competition in most of these professions, there might not
have been a non-Jewish middle class in England.

Although in the decades immediately before the Russian Revolution Jews
had already made enormous advances in social and economic status, a
major contribution of Slezkine's book is to document that Communism
was, indeed, "good for the Jews." After the Revolution, there was
active elimination of any remnants of the older order and their
descendants. Anti-Semitism was outlawed. Jews benefited from
"antibourgeois" quotas in educational institutions and other forms
of discrimination against the middle class and aristocratic elements of
the old regime, which could have competed with the Jews. While all
other nationalities, including Jews, were allowed and encouraged to
keep their ethnic identities, the revolution maintained an
anti-majoritarian attitude. (Some might argue that the parallel with
post '65 Civil Rights Act America ironic!)

Beyond the issue of demonstrating that the Jews benefited from the
Revolution lies the more important question of their role in
implementing it. Having achieved power and elite status, did their
traditional hostility to the leaders of the old regime, and to the
peasantry, contribute to the peculiarly ghastly character of the early
Soviet era?

On this question, Slezkine's contribution is decisive.

Despite the important role of Jews among the Bolsheviks, most Jews were
not Bolsheviks before the Revolution. However, Jews were prominent
among the Bolsheviks, and once the Revolution was underway, the vast
majority of Russian Jews became sympathizers and active participants.

Jews were particularly visible in the cities and as leaders in the army
and in the revolutionary councils and committees. For example, there
were 23 Jews among 62 Bolsheviks in the All-Russian Central Executive
Committee elected at the Second Congress of Soviets in October, 1917.
Jews were leaders of the movement and to a great extent they were its
public face.

Their presence was particularly notable at the top levels of the Cheka
and OGPU (two successive acronyms for the secret police). Here Slezkine
provides statistics on Jewish overrepresentation in these
organizations, especially in supervisory roles, and quotes historian
Leonard Shapiro's comment that "anyone who had the misfortune to
fall into the hands of the Cheka stood a very good chance of finding
himself confronted with and possibly shot by a Jewish investigator."

During the 1930s, Slezkine reports, the secret police, now known as the
NKVD, "was one of the most Jewish of all Soviet institutions", with
42 of the 111 top officials being Jewish. At this time 12 of the 20
NKVD directorates were headed by ethnic Jews, including those in charge
of State Security, Police, Labor Camps, and Resettlement (deportation).


The Gulag was headed by ethnic Jews from its beginning in 1930 until
the end of 1938, a period that encompasses the worst excesses of the
Great Terror.

They were, in Slezkine's remarkable phrase, "Stalin's willing
executioners".

Slezkine appears to take a certain pride in the drama of the role of
the Jews in Russia during these years. Thus he says they were

"among the most exuberant crusaders against 'bourgeois' habits
during the Great Transformation; the most disciplined advocates of
socialist realism during the 'Great Retreat' (from revolutionary
internationalism); and the most passionate prophets of faith, hope, and
combat during the Great Patriotic War against the Nazis".

Sometimes his juxtapositions between his descriptions of Jewish
involvement in the horror of the early Soviet period and the life
styles of the Jewish elite seem deliberately jarring. Lev Kopelev, a
Jewish writer who witnessed and rationalized the Ukrainian famine in
which millions died horrible deaths of starvation and disease as an
"historical necessity" is quoted saying "You mustn't give in to
debilitating pity. We are the agents of historical necessity. We are
fulfilling our revolutionary duty."

On the next page, Slezkine describes the life of the largely Jewish
elite in Moscow and Leningrad where they attended the theater, sent
their children to the best schools, had peasant women (whose families
were often the victims of mass murder) for nannies, spent weekends at
pleasant dachas and vacationed at the Black Sea.

Again, Slezkine discusses the heavily Jewish NKVD and the Jewish
leadership of the Great Terror of the 1930s. Then, he writes that in
1937 the prototypical Jewish State official "probably would have
been living in elite housing in downtown Moscow . . . with access to
special stores, a house in the country (dacha), and a live-in peasant
nanny or maid". He writes long and lovingly detailed sketches of life
at the dachas of the elite-the "open verandas overlooking small
gardens enclosed by picket fences..."

The reader is left on his own to recall the horrors of the Ukrainian
famine, the liquidation of the Kulaks, and the Gulag.

Slezkine attempts to dodge the issue of the degree to which the horrors
perpetrated by the early Soviet state were rooted in the traditional
attitudes of the Jews who in fact played such an extensive role in
their orchestration. He argues that the Jewish Communists were
Communists, not Jews.

This does not survive factual analysis.

One might grant the possibility that the revolutionary vanguard was
composed of Jews like Trotsky, apparently far more influenced by a
universalist utopian vision than by their upbringing in traditional
Judaism. But, even granting this, it does not necessarily follow for
the millions of Jews who left the shtetl towns, migrated to the cities,
and to such a large extent ran the USSR.

It strains credulity to suppose that these migrants completely and
immediately threw off all remnants of the Eastern European shtetl
culture-which, as Slezkine acknowledges, had a deep sense of
estrangement from non-Jewish society, a fear and hatred of peasants,
hostility toward the Czarist upper class, and a very negative attitude
toward Christianity.

In other words, the war against what Slezkine terms "rural
backwardness and religion" - major targets of the Revolution -
was exactly the sort of war that traditional Jews would have supported
wholeheartedly, because it was a war against everything they hated and
thought of as oppressing Jews.

However, while Slezkine seems comfortable with the notion of revenge as
a Jewish motive, he does not consider traditional Jewish culture itself
as a possible contributor to Jewish behavior in the new Communist
state.

Moreover, while it was generally true that Jewish servants of the
Soviet regime had ceased being religious Jews, this did not mean they
ceased having a Jewish identity. (Albert Lindeman made this point when
reviewing Slezkine in The American Conservative [article not on line].)


Slezkine quotes the philosopher Vitaly Rubin speaking of his career at
a top Moscow school in the 1930s where over half the students were
Jewish:

"Understandably, the Jewish question did not arise there...All the
Jews knew themselves to be Jews but considered everything to do with
Jewishness a thing of the past...There was no active desire to renounce
one's Jewishness. The problem simply did not exist."

In other words, in the early decades of the Soviet Union, the ruling
class was so heavily a Jewish milieu, that there was no need to
renounce a Jewish identity and no need to aggressively push for Jewish
interests. Jews had achieved elite status.

But ethnic networking continued nonetheless. Indeed, Slezkine reports
that when a leading Soviet spokesmen on anti-Semitism, Yuri Larin
(Lurie), tried to explain the embarrassing fact that Jews were, as he
said, "preeminent, overabundant, dominant, and so on" among the
elite in the Soviet Union, he mentioned the "unusually strong sense
of solidarity and a predisposition toward mutual help and
support"-ethnic networking by any other name.

Obviously, "mutual help and support" required that Jews recognize
each other as Jews. Jewish identity may not have been much discussed.
But it operated nonetheless, even if subconsciously, in the rarified
circles at the top of Soviet society.

Things changed. Slezkine shows that the apparent de-emphasis of Jewish
identity by many members of the Soviet elite during the 1920s and 1930s
turned out to be a poor indicator of whether or not these people
identified as Jews-or would do so when Jewish and Soviet identities
began to diverge in later years: when National Socialism reemphasized
Jewish identity, and when Israel emerged as a magnet for Jewish
sentiment and loyalty.

In the end, despite the rationalizations of many Soviet Jews on Jewish
identity in the early Soviet period, it was blood that mattered.

After World War II, in a process which remains somewhat obscure, the
Russian majority began taking back their country. One method was
"massive affirmative action" aimed at giving greater representation
to underrepresented ethnic groups. Jews became targets of suspicion
because of their ethnic status. They were barred from some elite
institutions, and had their opportunities for advancement limited.
Overt anti-Semitism was encouraged by the more covert official variety
apparent in the limits on Jewish advancement.

Under these circumstances, Slezkine says that Jews became "in many
ways, the core of the antiregime intelligentsia". Applications to
leave the USSR increased dramatically after Israel's Six-Day War of
1967 which, as in the United States and Eastern Europe, resulted in an
upsurge of Jewish identification and ethnic pride. The floodgates were
eventually opened by Gorbachev in the late 1980s. By 1994, 1.2 million
Soviet Jews had emigrated-43% of the total. By 2002, there were only
230,000 Jews remaining in the Russian Federation, 0.16% of the
population.

Nevertheless these remaining Jews remain overrepresented among the
elite. Six of the seven oligarchs who emerged in control of the Soviet
economy and media in the period of de-nationalization of the 1990s were
Jews.

As mentioned above, Slezkine's discussions of the Jewish experience
in the Middle East and America are quite perfunctory in comparison.

Slezkine views the Jewish migration to Israel as heroic and believes
the moral debt owed to Jews by Western societies justifies the most
extreme expressions of Jewish racialism:

"The rhetoric of ethnic homogeneity and ethnic deportations, tabooed
elsewhere in the West is a routine element of Israeli political life...
no other European state can have as strong a claim on the West's
moral imagination."

He sees the moral taboo on European ethnocentrism, the designation of
Nazism as the epitome of absolute evil, and the identification of Jews
as what he calls "the Chosen people of the postwar Western world"
as simply the inevitable results of the events of World War II. In
fact, of course, the creation and maintenance of the culture of the
Holocaust and the special moral claims of Jews and Israel might be more
fairly viewed the intended result of Jewish ethnic activism.

Slezkine's caricature of American history is close to preposterous.
He sees the United States as a Jewish promised land precisely because
it is not defined tribally and "has no state-bearing natives". In
fact, of course, the Founding Fathers very explicitly saw themselves as
Englishmen defending a specific political tradition. But (somewhat like
the Soviet Union's Jews in the early decades) they felt no need to
assert the cultural and ethnic parameters of their creation; they
asssumed the racial and cultural homogeneity of the Republic and
perceived no threat to its control by themselves and their descendants.


And when the Founding Fathers' descendents did percieve such a
threat, they reacted powerfully and decisively, with the Know-Nothing
movement in the 1850s and the Immigration Restriction (and associated
"Americanization" requirements) in the early 20th Century
Slezkine's acceptance of the "Proposition Nation" myth reflects
the triumph of intellectuals and propagandists, many of them Jewish,
led by Horace Kallen in the 1920s. These succesfully replaced the
previously standard view by which many Americans thought of themselves
as members of a very successful ethnic group derived from Great Britain
and with strong cultural and ethnic connections to Europe, particularly
Northern Europe.

The fate of Russia in the first two decades following the Revolution
prompts reflection on what might have happened in the United States had
American communists and their sympathizers assumed power. Sectors of
American society might perhaps have been deemed unacceptably backward
and superstitious and even worthy of mass murder by the American
counterparts of the Jewish elite in the Soviet Union-the ones who
journeyed to Ellis Island instead of Moscow.

Those "red state" voters who have loomed so important in recent
national elections would have been the enemy. The cultural and
religious attitudes of "red state" America are precisely those
attitudes that have been deemed changeworthy by the left, particularly
by the Jewish community, which has been the driving force of the left
in America throughout the 20th century.

As Joel Kotkin points out, "for generations, [American] Jews have
viewed religious conservatives with a combination of fear and
disdain."

And, as Elliott Abrams had noted, the American Jewish community
"clings to what is at bottom a dark vision of America, as a land
permeated with anti-Semitism..."

The dark view of traditional Slavs and their culture that caused so
many Eastern European shtetl Jews to become "willing executioners"
in the name of international socialism is unmistakably related, however
remotely, to the views of some contemporary American Jews about a
majority of their fellow countrymen.

Slezkine's main point is that the most important factor for
understanding the history of the 20th century is the rise of the Jews
in the West and the Middle East, and their rise and decline in Russia.
I think he is absolutely right about this.

If there is any lesson to be learned, it is that Jews not only became
an elite in all these areas, they became a hostile elite-hostile to
the traditional people and cultures of all three areas they came to
dominate.

So far, the greatest human tragedies have occurred in the Soviet Union.
But the presence of Israel in the Middle East is creating obvious
dangers there. And alienation remains a potent motive for the
disproportionate Jewish involvement in the transformation of the U.S.
into a non-European society through non-traditional immigration.

Given this record of Jews as a very successful but hostile elite, it is
possible that the continued demographic and cultural dominance of
Western European peoples will not be retained, either in Europe or the
United States, without a decline in Jewish influence.

But the lesson of the Soviet Union (as also Spain from the 15th-17th
centuries) is that Jewish influence does wane as well as wax. Unlike
the attitudes of the utopian ideologies of the 20th century, there is
no end to history.



Kevin MacDonald is Professor of Psychology at California State
University-Long Beach.

This article is adapted from a longer review

http://theoccidentalquarterly.com/vol5no3/53-km-slezkine.pdf

published in the Fall 2005 issue of The Occidental Quarterly.