When the Revolution took place in Russia the new Communist regime proclaimed freedom for all minorities and complete equality under the law. Believing this statement, Dr. Raisin made his optimistic prophecy quoted above. The present situation is as follows—I quote from Alvin Johnson’s foreword (President Emeritus, New School for Social Research) to The Jews in the Soviet Union, by Solomon Schwarz (Syracuse University Press), a work sponsored by the American Jewish Committee in 1951:
“Reports coming from behind the Iron Curtain describe the liquidation of all independent Jewish organisations and institutions, and the complete destruction of Jewish communal life. The Yiddish Press has been abolished, the Yiddish schools have been closed. Birobidzhan, proclaimed a national home for Soviet Jews, is a failure; few Jews remain, and there is no autonomous Jewish life in the ‘Autonomous Region’, Zionist activities are banned and no Jews can receive exit permits for emigration to Israel. The younger generation has been educated to abhor the religion their fathers held sacred. Recent reports describe violent propaganda against ‘Jewish nationalism’ and ‘Jewish cosmopolitanism’, extensive purges among the Jewish intelligentsia, the resurgence of discrimination in government service, and growing popular anti-Semitism, often exploited by the ruling circles for their own political purposes.”
As far back as 1912, Lenin was prophesying ideological war between Party aspirations and the autonomous aspirations of the Jewish minority group. He talked of “Jewish nationalists and others in that gang”, and “if we are to keep silent the Jewish Marxists will be riding us tomorrow. After all, there is a limit. And if these gentlemen think that the minority (i.e. the Bolshevik group in the thirteen-man Social Democratic group) is duty bound to submit even when they tear the programme to pieces, they are grossly mistaken ... since they are ready for steps of this kind, we shall have to wage war...”1
In different language at an earlier time, Titus could have spoken in exactly the same way of the autonomous aspirations of the Palestine province of the Roman Empire. There is simply no room for nonconforming minorities in a totalitarian regime.
It is now our melancholy task to sift the pogrom figures as far as they are known in the Soviet Empire. With the iron clamp of the Soviet propaganda department on the means of communication, little is known of the total picture, but what is known is scarifying.
The mass exterminations of Jews by the Nazis begun in 1941 and discussed in the next chapter failed by a few months to achieve total victory. Thus, although the Nazis cremated three hundred thousand Jews in Czechoslovakia, sixty thousand managed to survive; so too fifteen thousand of the seventy-five thousand Jews of Yugoslavia. When these Jews and others crept back to satellite Communist countries, the Soviet Government published nothing on the mass exterminations of them and maintained a conspiracy of silence on their anti-Jewish character. As the Jews crept out of the concentration camps and trekked home their march coincided with the sovietisation of Central Europe. The Soviet Army marched on Sofia in September 1944; the Russian army of occupation established a Communist Government in Rumania in March 1945; in a similar way Hungary was sovietised; Marshal Rokossovsky became dictator in Poland; and there was a Communist coup in Czechoslovakia—all under the myopic eyes of Western statesmen, who at Teheran and Yalta had already betrayed the absolute values of honesty, truth and justice.
Immediately Communist police and propaganda machines hunted out and stigmatised “enemies of the people” and began the blood-soaked pattern of liquidation of “traitors, collaborators” and the rest. In all classes a social transformation was effected. Peasant farmers were expropriated and reduced to agricultural slaves working on collective farms under State supervision. The middle classes—business men, artisans, owners of small businesses—were expropriated, thousands of them deported, nearly all of them declared surplus and redundant. The workers, after initial preferential treatment, were reduced to industrial slavery. Their right to strike was abolished, they were compulsorily assigned to certain jobs, their pay went down, their hours of work went up and satellite manufacturers were forced to manufacture for Russia the goods the Slave-Master wanted, at prices set by the Monster. A giant bureaucracy came into being over all of Central Europe so that the Kremlin lackeys could ensure that satellite slaves should meet and satisfy the hunger of the Slave-Master.
It was no wonder that rebellion smouldered among the satellites and that after the Tito defection in 1948 repressive measures, murders and purges should be daily occurrences as the Kremlin cracked the whip and brought its slaves into line. In Hungary, Albania, Bulgaria, Rumania, Poland and Czechoslovakia men fell sick, disappeared, “died”, were arrested, sacked, brain-washed and made to confess. After the Slansky trial in 1952 all was ripe, as we shall see, for pogrom.
Russia wrote off Israel and the Jews in 1948. Up till that time resistance by Jews in Palestine to the British had made Moscow hope for a satellite bastion on the shores of the Mediterranean. When Israel regained its independence as a new nation, however, and showed no friendship to Moscow the party line underwent a change. Zionism became bourgeois, American, imperialistic and counter-revolutionary. All over Russia and its satellites the new line was to denounce the Jews and suppress their institutions.
The first hint came in a show trial in Budapest in September 1949 when a lackey of the Hungarian Politburo was indicted of plotting against Hungary and being in the pay of foreign Powers. He was brainwashed, of course, and confessed eagerly that he had worked with “counter-revolutionary Zionism”.
Next a number of Communist Jews were purged from lackey ministries in Czechoslovakia. The purge-master, a Jew, was the party boss, Rudolph Slansky. His turn came in November 1951 after a series of strikes and acts of sabotage by worker slaves, when he was arrested by Gottwald and put on trial together with a number of Jewish associates in the party.
The Communist Press began the process of preparatory softening-up of the public mind, prior to pogrom. Zionists, they said, were propagandisers of imperialist ideologies and secret subversive workers against Socialism. In the meantime Slansky and his co-defendants had been brain-washed by the Communist Inquisition and when they “confessed” at their trial they emphasised that their Jewish origin was the cause of their defection. One of them, a Jew named Andre Simon, ended his testimony with this appeal: “The only service I can still render is to serve as a warning to those who, because of their origin, their character and qualities are in danger of going the same diabolic way I went. The more severe my punishment, the more efficient will be the warning.”2
The prosecutor in his summing-up said of the eleven Jewish defendants: “Their cosmopolitanism and their Jewish bourgeois nationalism are indeed only two sides of the same coin, minted in Wall Street.”
As always, a stereotype is needed for pogrom, and here it was—the Jew, the nationalist and the internationalist; what does it matter if the two adjectives are contradictory, all distinctions are unities in doublethink.
Immediately after the trial a wave of suicides occurred among the Jews—just as they did in York when the English pogrom of the twelfth century began.
In the meantime mass deportation of Jews had been taking place in Hungary. Its legal basis was founded on two anti-Semitic laws of the Horthy regime in 1939. Under these decrees people of “alien class origin” could be deported to the Hungarian-Soviet border. A report from Hungary3 said that tens of thousands of people in 1952 were being transported in sealed freight trains to the border camp where the victims are classified ... “just as in Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen or Mauthausen, sadistic doctors and terrorists do the selecting”... the politicos were “extradited” and sent to the Soviet Union, the rest to the Urals and to slave labour, some also to China as military labour slaves.
Not all of these victims were Jews. According to Vatican Radio, over a third of thirty-eight thousand slaves deported in December 1951 from Budapest were Jews.
In Rumania the pattern was no different. Jews born in Bessarabia and Northern Bucovina were rounded up in Rumania by the police, the militia and Soviet secret police, put in freight cars and shipped to Russia. This was on September 1st, 1949.
Rumania had the largest Jewish population in Central Europe.
Mass deportations, mostly of Jews, took place in February 1952 to slave camps in the Black Sea neighbourhood. Nearly a hundred thousand Jews were thus condemned to slavery.4
Emigration to the new State of Israel was sternly curtailed by the Communist Governments of Central Europe. The death-rate in Russian slave camps is so high that human fodder is constantly needed.
The most exact figures are furnished by Russian treatment of Polish Jews in the eastern provinces of Poland in 1939. Two hundred and fifty to three hundred thousand Jews were sent to slave labour in the remote regions of Northern and Asiatic Russia during the process of sovietising these provinces.
There is no hope for Jewry under the hammer and sickle. And as we shall now see, their treatment under the crooked cross was a matter for despair.