Antisemitism in Europe and America in the first quarter of the twentieth century was both virulent and widespread. And, until Nazi Germany, perhaps nowhere was it worse in both respects than the Tsarist Russia of Katya's birth. Prejudice against Jews in Russia was so great that Jews had not even been allowed in Russia, either for settlement or to trade, until the partition of Poland in the late eighteenth century suddenly brought hundreds of thousands of Jews under the control of the Tsarist regime. They were not greeted kindly.
Over the course of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, Jews in Russia faced various cycles of forced resettlement, forced conversion, forced conscription, restrictions on area of settlement, restrictions on land ownership, restrictions on profession, restrictions on movement, restrictions on education, and also periodic waves of looting, rape, and murder, all either initiated by or with the tacit complicity of the Russian government. Although there were, of course, exceptions, these actions seem to have had the support (and often the involvement) of the Russian people. The Synod of the Orthodox Russian Church was hardly alone in his sentiments when he declared that the ideal end result of government policies on Jews would be "one third converted, one third deported, and one third dead."
It is hardly surprising, therefore, that when a variety of revolutionary movements began in Russia, the Jews were represented in numbers disproportionate to the population as a whole. Russians of Jewish origin were involved in the leadership of the Bolsheviks, the Mensheviks, the Social Democrats, and the Anarchists, among others (I use the term "of Jewish origin" here because most of the members of these groups were avowed atheists, a fact which became important to the history of antisemitism in Russia somewhat later on.) Other Russian Jews emigrated - in large numbers - to escape the Tsarist regime, or joined the emerging Zionist movement.
When the Tsars finally fell, the result was unprecedented freedom for the Jews in Russia. And in the civil war that followed, it became clear early on which side the Jews would be better off backing; while the Red (Communist) army had a stated - and enforced - policy against antisemitism either within the army or against the populace, the White (Tsarist) army and its allies actively blamed all of Russia's problems on the Jews, and encouraged killing any that were found. This culminated, towards the end of the war, in the razing of an entire village, leaving 1500 dead. Again unsurprisingly, Russian Jews joined the Red Army in droves. (It seems reasonable to assume, by the way, although I have been unable to verify it, that in addition to the Bolsheviks stated position against antisemitism, one of the reasons for the Red Army's policy was that it was run by Leon Trotsky, who was of Jewish origin.)
At any rate, as a result of the above factors, when the Bolsheviks finally won the war, many Russian Jews found positions in the new government - and also in the new Secret Service (incidentally, in 1920 Winston Churchill, admittedly in a speech which was both anticommunist and antisemitic, noted with surprise the number of Jewish women in high positions in the Soviet secret service. What do you know.) The new Soviet government instituted the first active campaign against antisemitism ever in Russia, and the restrictive laws against Jews were eliminated.
All was not completely rosy for the majority of Jews in the new Soviet regime, however: the atheistic Soviet leadership saw Judaism as a religion to be eliminated, like any other. Their goal was to assimilate the members of various religions, including Judaism, into the new religion-free Soviet culture. Obviously, this did not sit well with the majority of Jews in Russia, many of whom were at this point Zionists who thought it crucial to preserve their culture and heritage. The new government met with resistance from the Zionists, many Zionists were jailed, the use of Hebrew was banned off-and-on, and a number of other measures were taken against the practice of Judaism as a religion in the early days of the new regime. By 1925, however, political necessity caused the measures against the religion to be relaxed, the atheists and the Zionists came to an uneasy peace, and the position of Jews in Russia was better than it had been at pretty much any other time since perhaps the fourteenth century.
The internal conflicts among the Jews in Russia, however, were largely ignored by the forces of antisemitism and anticommunism abroad, which were quick to label Communism as a Jewish Conspiracy.
The governments of the western world, as has been noted in previous fun facts, were terrified that the successful Russian Revolution might result in similar rebellions in their own countries. At the same time, antisemitic sentiment in the general populace was flaring particularly high. Given the circumstances of the Revolution as detailed above, it was perhaps inevitable that the two would be conflated, both by deliberately calculating politicians and the mob mentality.
Pundits in Europe and America were quick to note the relatively high numbers of Jews in the leadership of the Russian Revolution, Soviet government, and Secret Service, and accused the Communist movement of being, for example, a Jewish plot to enslave all non-Jews (apparently conveniently ignoring the Soviet government's own policies against the religion, not to mention the non-Jewish origin of, for example, Lenin, Stalin, and as far as I know the whole of the communist revolutionary movement in China.) With bizarre circular logic, Communists were persecuted on the grounds that they worked for the Jews, and Jews were persecuted on the grounds that they worked for the Communists. The two hatreds fed each other; when one lagged, the other would fan the flames. Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in the movement of the day most noted for being simultaneously anticommunist and antisemitic: Fascism.
To be fair to Mussolini, the originator of Fascism, he was at first far more concerned with persecuting communists than persecuting Jews (although this probably isn't going to raise him too many notches in Katya's opinion, considering his other policies like trying to keep women at home making little fascist babies.) That he did start gradually introducing antisemitic measures may be more a testimony to growing influence of Hitler on the fascist movement than to his own beliefs, and there is some evidence that Mussolini's anti-Jewish measures did not sit particularly well with the Italian people. Nevertheless, he did introduce such measures, as the combination of antisemitism and anticommunism began to find their apotheosis in the fascism of the Nazi party, whose policies on both issues are well enough known that little probably need be said about them. In 1925, even though Hitler is still (if I remember correctly) languishing in jail after his first failed attempt to take over the German government, he is a growing force in German national politics.
Perhaps ironically, by the time Hitler had risen to power, Stalin was firmly in control of Russia, and in order to secure his hold on power, he killed off the Jewish presence in the Soviet government in a series of purges. Stalin was not Jewish (indeed, at one time he had trained for the priesthood), and under his leadership, the governmental policies against Judaism were reinstated in full force. In that atmosphere, the Russian prejudice against Jews, which had not had time to die off, revived fully, and this time the government, which no longer had a significant group of Jewish heritage within it, did nothing. In the long decades that followed, communist Russia became known once more as one of the most antisemitic nations on earth, even as accusations of Communism as a Jewish conspiracy continued to be made in the rest of the world. One or two of which, I am horrified to say, I came across as recently as last night.
Pleasant dreams.
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