by Kerry Bolton
Despite what appears to have been Khrushchev’s role in Stalin’s death, and his famous repudiation of Stalinism, under his leadership the Soviet bloc did not succumb by radically deviating from Stalin’s path in the way Beria sought. The Soviet bloc remained the main obstacle to American-plutocratic hegemony until succumbing to pressures from within and without. While we today live under a de facto one-world government, if it had not been for Stalin’s obstructionism we would likely have succumbed to a de jure one-world state over six decades previously.
Chapter VII
The USSR After Stalin’s Death
Despite what appears to be Khrushchev’s complicity in the death of Stalin, possibly because of little or no options in the face of Beria’s power, Beria’s succession to leadership was very short-lived. Khrushchev with his secret address to the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956 seemed to be about to embark on a new course and he is generally credited with the ‘de-Stalinization’ of the Soviet bloc. Yet, until the assumption of Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet bloc, especially spanning the regimes from Khrushchev to Brezhnev, remained as nationalistically intransigent toward US globalism and cultural decay as it was under Stalin. Also notable was the Soviet bloc’s continued opposition to Israel and to World Zionism.
Soviet Origins of Anti-Zionism
There had always been a conflict between Zionist Jews and secularist Jews in the socialist movements throughout the world. Secularist or ‘apostate’ Jews believed that the best means of combating ‘anti-Semitism’ was for Jews to abandon their separate ethnic identity and assimilate into a new world socialist society. Zionists to the contrary regarded assimilation as ethnic suicide and held that anti-Semitism could never be eliminated from Gentile societies. Their best course was therefore to separate. Into this mix there was an influential element that combined Zionism and socialism. Moses Hess, who had an early influence on Karl Marx, was a leading proponent of both Zionism and Socialism[425].
However, Karl Marx was a secularist Jew who was antagonistic towards what he considered to be the ‘Jewish spirit’ in capitalism. Given his own money-grubbing mentality, this might have been no more than psychological project. Nonetheless, he believed that Jews needed ‘emancipating’ from their preoccupation with money, writing:
Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist. … The god of the Jews has become secularized and has become the god of the world. The bill of exchange is the real god of the Jew. His god is only an illusory bill of exchange. The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the merchant, of the man of money in general. What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money. Very well then! Emancipation from huckstering and money, consequently from practical, real Judaism, would be the self-emancipation of our time[426].
Antagonism towards Jew was of long duration in Russia[427] and was the primary reason why so many Jews entered the revolutionary movements to overthrow the Czar. Russian anti-Semitism manifested organisationally in The Black Hundred who opposed capitalism as much as socialism, and perceived them as equally Jewish[428] .
Stalin, in his fight for leadership, was up against a large number of veteran Jewish Bolsheviks, Trotsky being the principal enemy, as we have seen. Although originally supporting the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, this was primarily a means by which the USSR could destabilise the Middle East and head-off Anglo-American and other rival influences in the region. It was a matter of realpolitik, of which Stalin was a master, not sympathy towards Zionism. The question of the loyalty of Jews in the USSR and wider Soviet bloc after World War II became a further factor in Stalin’s antagonism towards Jewish interests, as their loyalties were divided with the establishment of Israel. Hence, in Stalinism the old Czarist suspicion of Jews was revived as a State policy with a justification that Marx himself had condemned the ‘Jewish spirit’ of capitalism and that there had been a conflict of interests, even among Jews themselves, between Zionism, Socialism and Socialist-Zionism going back to before the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.
Winston S Churchill referred to this in 1920 in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution, as a ‘struggle for the soul of the Jewish people’[429]. In writing of Chaim Weizmann, who became first President to Israel, Laurence Krane states of this:
…Some Jews felt that the savior of the Jews would come through political reform such as communism or socialism. Others argued that assimilation would answer the problem of anti-Semitism and ease the economic hardships of the Jew. Still others maintained that immigration to Palestine, as Israel was called then, and by building up settlements in the Land would save the Jews from economic privation and exploitation[430].
As in Czarist Russia, in the Soviet bloc from the time of Stalin, Jews via Zionism were again seen as subversives aligned with Israel and the capitalist powers. The USSR henceforth became a centre of resistance to Zionism, which was described with Marxist rhetoric as an agent of imperialism. Much effort was expended in exposing the character of Zionism not simply as the doctrine of the Israeli State, but as having worldwide ramifications.
One representative example is entitled Zionism: Instrument of Imperialist Reaction, published in 1970[431]. The book is a collection of letters of protest against Zionism and Israel written to the Soviet press, mainly by Soviet Jews, and a selection of articles by various writers that had been published in the Soviet press. For example, Prof. Braginsky’s article ‘The Class Essence of Zionism’, originally published in Pravda[432] , drew on Marxist and Leninist thinking in regard to Jewish autonomy, stating that Jewish assimilation is the ‘historically progressive process’, alluding to Marx’s position on the issue, and quoting Lenin[433].
In late 1951 Rudolf Slansky, Secretary General of the Communist Party in Czechoslovakia was arrested for ‘anti-state activities’. A year later he and thirteen co-defendants went on trial as ‘Trotskyite-Titoist-Zionist traitors’. It is interesting that Trotskyite and Zionist were used in conjunction. They were accused of espionage and economic sabotage, working on behalf of Yugoslavia, Israel and the West. Eleven of the fourteen were sentenced to death, the other three to life imprisonment. Slansk, et al were hanged on 3 December, 1952. Of the fourteen defendants, eleven were Jews, and were identified as such in the indictment. Many other Jews were mentioned as co-conspirators. They were implicated in a cabal that included US Supreme Court Justice Frankfurter, an influential Zionist politico, described as a ‘Jewish nationalist’ in the Czechoslovak indictment, and Mosha Pijade the ‘Titoist Jewish ideologist’ in Tito’s Yugoslavia, that had broken with the Soviet bloc.
The 1952 Prague Trials of Slansky et al, accused of working for Israel, World Zionism and the USA against the State, and other moves against Zionism, were not lost on the radical Right in Europe and the USA. A faction of the Right saw the Soviet bloc as preferable to American global hegemony, and the USA as the harbinger of cultural decay. In the latter respect especially, they were very much in accord with the official Soviet attitude towards ‘rootless cosmopolitanism’. Many German war veterans who had fought the USSR had no intention of doing so again for US interests, and Major-General Otto E Remer’s Socialist Reich Party was a particular concern for the post-war Occupation Authorities for its advocacy of a ‘neutralist’ line during the Cold War. In the USA the bi-weekly anti-communist newspaper, Common Sense, adopted a vigorously pro-Soviet line, their primary columnist, Fred Farrel, a widely experienced and travelled veteran reporter, stated the newspaper’s consistent line for several decades until its demise in the 1970s that, ‘the best anti-Communists I have ever known were the Stalinists. They fought Communism with a cold deadly, remorseless, realistic efficiency’.[434]
The Prague scenario was repeated in 1968 in Czechoslovakia and in Poland. Paul Landvai writes of the ‘Zionist plot’ against Poland where the State accused Zionists of ‘an open attack on the poli
tical system and its leaders’ in the form of intellectual dissent and student demonstrations, which had been prompted by the State suppression of a student theatrical production. This State action was undertaken in the name of anti-Zionism, and factory and political meetings organised by the Communist party were held under the slogan ‘Purge the Party of Zionists’[435]. Landvai states that since 1966, there had been a ‘Jewish department’ in the Ministry of Interior, led by Colonel Walichnowski, ‘author of the anti-Zionist best-seller, Israel and the Federal Republic of Germany’. [436]
The 1967 Israeli Six Day War had instigated a new Soviet anti-Zionist campaign. In reaction dissident elements had begun to criticise the anti-Israel policy of the regime. The Czechoslovak Writers’ Congress of 26-29 June 1967, addressed itself to the Party leadership. The Congress’ pro-Israel position was aligned with demands for liberalisation[437]. During the May Day demonstration of 1967 students carried Israeli flags and placards demanding ‘Let Israel Live
’. The philosophical faculty at Prague’s Charles University issued a petition demanding the resumption of diplomatic relations with Israel. [438]
The opening shots fired by Stalin at World Zionism only intensified after his death.
In 1969, just a year after the attempted weakening of the Soviet bloc through Czechoslovakia, The Publishing House for Political Literature in the USSR, published a particularly cogent book entitled Caution, Zionism! by Yuri Ivanov[439] , the chief Soviet expert on Israel. It is was wide-ranging book not only on Zionism but also on Jewish history since ancient times, and is therefore something far more than simply ‘anti-Zionist’. At the time of its distribution it caused Zionist objections throughout the world.
Pionerskaya Pravda, the newspaper of the 10,000,000 member Young Pioneers, carried an article in 1981 that stated, ‘the major portion of American newspapers and television and radio companies are in Zionist hands’. The article stated, ‘Jewish bankers and billionaires’ were behind the Jewish Defense League, ‘which terrorizes Soviet diplomats and other Soviet officials in the United States’. Pionerskaya claimed that ‘most of the biggest monopolies for the production of weapons are controlled by Jewish bankers. Business and blood bring them enormous profits’[440]. The themes were very similar to those expressed by Ivanov in the widely distributed Caution, Zionism! There were many other such publications on Zionism published by the Soviet bloc and translated into various languages. These included: In the Name of the Father and the Son where the author states that ‘American imperialism’[441] serves Zionism rather than the usual Soviet contention that Zionism serves American imperialism. Creeping Counter-Revolution, which states that ‘anti-Semitism is an elemental response of the enslaved strata of the working populace to their barbaric exploitation by the Jewish bourgeoisie’.[442] Invasion Without Arms, stating that the ‘chief strategic aim of Zion’ is to maintain Jews as the ‘ruling caste of capitalist society’. In words reminiscent of Stalin’s campaign against ‘rootless cosmopolitism’, the author states that Zionists attempt to destroy ‘national cultures’ by promoting ‘alien’ and ‘cosmopolitan ideas’.[443] In Class Essence of Zionism it is alleged that the creation of Israel gave rise to ‘dual loyalty’ among Jews towards the states in which they lived, and that they act as a subversive ‘fifth column’. Zionist bankers and industrialists control the world through economic and political subterfuge, with the exception of the Soviet bloc, against which the Zionists were marshalling. [444]
Conclusion
With demise of the USSR anti-Zionist ideologues, academics, activists and bureaucrats of the old Soviet regime entered the new regime, and continue the anti-Zionist legacy. Walter Laqueur has written of this ‘anti-Semitism’ in Russia from Czarist times, through the Soviet era to the present.[445] However, whether one calls it ‘anti-Semitism’ or a conflict between political systems, a Cold War II has emerged with the rise of Putin, whom many see as continuing in the style of Stalin, not least because of his intransigence, again reminiscent of Stalin, towards American designs for what is blatantly called a ‘new world order’.
Many Nationalists, from Europe to the USA, as in Stalin’s time, again see Russia as the most likely bulwark against American globalism and cultural decadence. For example, an organisation named Euro-Rus, a think tank of Right-wing academics promoting friendship with Russia as the basis for a united Europe, states that its aim is the creation of a ‘European axis’ based around ‘Paris-Berlin-Moscow’. Delegates at the 2008 conference held in Belgium, the theme being ‘Russia and the Building of European Thought’, came from Russia, Belgium, Bulgaria, France, Netherlands, and Greece, and the USA.[446] Dr Pavel Tulaev, a seminal figure in the ‘Russian New Right’, also works for a Euro-Russian bloc that is not entangled with either the USA or China.
Should the Cold War, which only really had a thaw during the Gorbachev and Yeltsin interregnum, reach and even surpass the intensity of that of the 1950s and 1960s, as Russia seeks to reassert its position as a world power, the American radical Right, and indeed factions of the radical Right around the world, can be expected to intensify this pro-Russian outlook as they continue to see the potential of a revived Russia as a bulwark against a regime that is seen as more ‘Semitic’ than ‘American’.
K R Bolton has doctorates in theology and related areas, Ph.D. honoris causa and certifications in psychology and social work studies. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social and Political Research (Athens), and a Member of T3 Indian Defence Research, a ‘contributing writer’ for Foreign Policy Journal, and a regular columnist for The Great Indian Dream (Indian Institute of Planning and Management) and New Dawn (Australia). He has been widely published by the scholarly and broader media.
Books include:
Revolution from Above (Arktos Media Ltd., 2011),
The Parihaka Cult (Black House Publishing, 2012),
Artists of the Right (Counter-Currents Publishing, 2012).
STALIN
The Enduring Legacy Kerry Bolton
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[1] Oswald Spengler, The Hour of Decision (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1963), 61.
[2] K R Bolton, ‘Jünger and National-Bolshevism’ in Jünger: Thoughts & Perspectives Vol. XI (London: Black Front Press, 2012).
[3] Association for the Study of the Planned Economy of Soviet Russia.
[4] League of Professional Intellectuals.
[5] K R Bolton, ‘Jünger and National-Bolshevism’, op. cit.
[6] Cited by John J Stephan, The Russian Fascists (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1978), 338.
[7] K R Bolton, ‘Francis Parker Yockey: Stalin’s Fascist Advocate’, International Journal of Russian Studies, Issue No. 6, 2010,
http://www.radtr.net/dergi/sayi6/bolton6.htm
[8] See Chapter III: ‘The Moscow Trials in Historical Context’.
[9] R Service, Comrades: Communism: A World History (London: Pan MacMillan, 2008), 97.
[10] Ibid., 98.
[11] Ibid., 107.
[12] Ibid., 109.
[13] Ibid., 116.
[14] G Dimitrov, Dimitrov and Stalin 1934-1943: Letters from the Soviet Archives, 32, cited by R Service, ibid., 220.
[15] R Service, ibid., 220.
[16] G Dimitrov, op. cit., cited by Service, ibid., 221.
[17] R Service, ibid., 222.
[18] Ibid.
[19] Hungarians.
[20] Richard Overy, The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia (London: Allen Lane, 2004), 201.
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[21] L I Shvetsova, et al. (eds.), Rasstrel’nye spiski: Moskva, 1937-1941: ... Kniga pamiati zhertv politicheskii repressii. (‘The Execution List: Moscow, 1937-1941: ... Book of Remembrances of the victims of Political Repression’), (Moscow: Memorial Society, Zven’ia Publishing House, 2000), 229.
[22] L Sedov, ‘Why did Stalin Need this Trial?’, The Red Book on the Moscow Trials, http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/sedov/works/red/ch01.htm
[23] Ibid., ‘Domestic Political Reasons’.
[24] R Service, op. cit., 240-241.
[25] Ibid., 242.
[26] Ibid.
[27] Ibid.
[28] Given that when Trotsky was empowered under Lenin he established or condoned the methods of jurisprudence, concentration camps, forced labour, and the ‘Red Terror’, that were later to be placed entirely at the feet of Stalin.
[29] Karl Marx, ‘Proletarians and Communists’, The Communist Manifesto, (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975), 68.
[30] K R Bolton, ‘The State versus Parental Authority’, Journal of Social, Political & Economic Studies, Vol. 36, No. 2, Summer 2011, 197-217.
[31] K Marx, Communist Manifesto, op. cit.
[32] See Chapter V.
[33] L Sedov, op. cit., ‘Reasons of Foreign Policy’.
