Re: Jews and Bolsheviks
Steve, you are on the right track, where the relatively large number of Jews among the early Bolshevik leadership is concerned. Lenin himself, a "pure" ethnic Russian (despite the attempts of anti-Semites to ascribe a Jewish grandmother to him), estimated that one-third of the delegates to the second congress of the Russian Social Democratic Party were Jews -- and that proportion of Jews in the leadership probably held true until the mid-twenties.
I think there are three basic reasons for that: 1) the Jews developed a "proletarian" workers' movement before the Russians did; 2) Jewish intellectuals, having no "national territory" of their own within the Empire, identified more with the all-Russian "working class movement" than with the nationalist movements (Polish, Ukrainian, etc.) that arose in the Pale of Settlement where they lived; and 3) the Jews were without question treated worse than any other national/religious group in the Empire: confined to the Pale, subjected to numerous officially-inspired pogroms, etc., etc., they had no reason to support the status quo.
In the Russian Empire, Russia proper was very late in developing any kind of workers' movement. The workers' movement in Poland was the most advanced, because Poland was the most industrialized area of the Empire. Next came Belorussia and Lithuania, both located in the Jewish Pale of Settlement, where the workers' movements were primarily Jewish. Eventually, the various Jewish workers' groups merged into the Jewish Bund (the Social Democratic Party of Jewish workers), which in turn eventually merged with the newer Russian Social Democratic Party.
The RSDP, for its part, soon split into two factions, the Bolsheviks (the Majority) and the Mensheviks (the Minority). Needless to say there were as many, if not more, Jews among the Mensheviks as among the Bolsheviks; yet during the Revolution, they found themselves on opposite sides of the barricades. For that matter, many of the leaders of the revolutionary peasant party, the Socialist Revolutionaries, also were Jewish; they, too, ended up in opposition to the Bolsheviks, after the Revolution.
Nevertheless, the Jews never composed the MAJORITY of the Bolshevik leadership, and Trotsky's creation, the Red Army, was based on the peasantry. As time went on, and the party expanded its membership, the proportion of Jews declined rapidly. By Gorbachev's day, there was not a single Jew in the Politburo.
There is a lot more that could and should be written on this subject, but I think that is quite enough for now. :-)
jbe |
