Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler

by Robert Gellately

  During the civil war, pogroms were carried out by the Red Army. The White armies, however, were the greatest killers of Jews. The White terror was not centrally directed and was sometimes more horrific when renegade troops ran wild. Major population centers like Kiev changed hands more than a dozen times, and thus gave the Whites the opportunity to find victims. Captured Bolsheviks were often brutally butchered, as indeed was anyone suspected of sympathizing with the “Judeo-Bolshevik” cause.

  The accusation that the Jews were behind the Russian Revolution, which was part of a larger conspiracy to win control of the world, was common currency among White armies. Although the notorious forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion appeared well before 1914, it was popularized in Russia during the civil war. White officers carried abbreviated copies of the book and read it to their troops. The theory was that the Jews were behind the Russian Revolution, and it was considered “proven” by Trotsky’s prominent role as head of the Red Army. Posters put out by the Whites showed Trotsky as a Jewish monster.

  The murder of the royal family helped to turn The Protocols of the Elders of Zion into a publishing success especially among Whites and exiles. New forgeries updated the conspiracy charges. These “revealing documents” had aftereffects, and not just in Russia. They were widely published in Germany and found a ready audience on the right-wing fringes where conspiracy theories linked Jews to the disastrous end of the war and the rise of Communism.19

  For many in the White armies, the nefarious role of the Jews was beyond dispute.20 The catchwords circulating in the Donbass ran as follows: “Beat the Jews and Save Russia,” or “Death to the Jews and Communists,” and “Jews and Russians, Get out of Ukraine.”21

  Pogroms swept the area occupied by the Whites in the south. The scale of the murder was unprecedented. Estimates suggest that the number killed (in western Russia, Byelorussia, and Ukraine) was between 100,000 and 200,000. Sometimes the killing started with a rumor that Jews had “welcomed the Bolsheviks with joy.” Their houses were then plundered and the women ravished.

  The pogroms were worst in Ukraine and escalated over the course of 1919, growing with each setback suffered by the Whites, until the year culminated in both their defeat and mass murder of Jews, who were humiliated and tortured before being killed.

  White officers claimed they “filtered” their prisoners for Jews and killed them because they were thought of as “microbes” or a “social disease” to be eliminated. What usually followed was the slaughter of defenseless women and children and men.22

  For example, the Cossacks attacked Fastov, a small village near Kiev, on September 23–26, 1919. The prosperous village was home to some ten thousand Jews. The Cossacks went from house to house in search of money and tried to extort it with violence. Women of all ages were raped and sometimes ordered to shout, “Beat Yids, save Russia.” By the time the Cossacks finished, they left behind between thirteen hundred and fifteen hundred dead.23 Cossack troops also raped among their own people and shocked young Red idealists who came upon what happened.24

  General Denikin, head of the southern White army, was disgusted by the pogroms but too weak to stop them. He did not want to appear “pro-Jewish” at a time when these passions ran high. Anti-Semitism filtered down to the troops, who tried to ascertain whether any of their prisoners were “Yids” and shot them out of hand.25 The Red Army and other Soviet forces also raped and pillaged the Jews, though far less frequently. Lenin issued the mildest rebuke but said surprisingly little about the anti-Semitic rampages of the Whites. He felt no need to deal with the popularity of the allegations spread by “ultra-right-wing bodies claiming that the Bolshevik revolution was a Jewish revolution and that the commissars were all Jews.”26

  DE-COSSACKIZATION

  The Cossacks had enjoyed special social and political status under the tsarist regime. After 1917 their regions in the south of Russia were identified as bastions of the old order and part of the hard-core counterrevolution. The Don Cossack government had even gone so far as to offer refuge to Kerensky’s provisional government after it was overthrown. Some ordinary peasants wanted to see the status of the proud Cossacks reduced and the red stripes removed from the trousers of their distinctive dress. The approach of the Soviet government was far more radical.

  On January 24, 1919, as the Red Army moved into the Don territory, the Communist Party’s Central Committee issued detailed instructions on how to proceed: “Recent events on various fronts in the Cossack regions—our advance to the heart of Cossack settlements and demoralization among Cossack forces—compel us to give directions to Party officials on the nature of their work in establishing and consolidating Soviet power in the specified regions. Considering the experience of a year of civil war against the Cossackry, we must recognize the only proper means to be a merciless struggle with the entire Cossack elite by means of their total extermination.” The document concluded: “No compromises, no halfway measures are permissible.”27

  This “de-Cossackization” visualized indiscriminate terror to eliminate these people as a recognizable ethnic group. The area’s poor were to be resettled on former Cossack lands.

  The Bolshevik president of the Revolutionary Committee of the Don set out to conduct what he called “an indiscriminate policy of massive extermination.” In the month from mid-February to mid-March 1919, the Bolsheviks executed more than eight thousand Cossacks. Some tried to fight back, but it was hopeless.28

  By 1920 the Bolsheviks had returned, more murderous than ever. By the end of the year the tide had turned against the Whites, and there were massacres on an unheard-of scale. The Cheka under Karl Lander went to the North Caucasus and the Don and, behind the fig leaf of using “tribunals,” set out with a vengeance to “de-Cossackize.” In October alone they executed more than six thousand people. In Pyatigorsk the Cheka decided in advance to kill three hundred in one day and took quotas from each part of town. Some locals capitalized on the misfortune of the Cossacks and used denunciations to gain personal advantages. Lander reported that the Cheka in Kislovodsk, “for lack of a better idea,” killed all the patients in the hospital. Scores of hostages of supposed counterrevolutionaries were sent to concentration camps, where many died. An integral part of these operations involved the wholesale sexual exploitation of the women.

  On October 23, the president of the Revolutionary Committee of the North Caucasus, Sergo Ordzhonikidze, one of Stalin’s close allies, ordered the Cossacks to be killed or forced out. Their towns were razed. The most reliable estimates indicate that between 300,000 and 500,000 were killed or deported in 1919–20. These losses were suffered by a population totaling around three million at the time.29

  Communist leaders expressed few reservations about these events. They were more concerned about whether or not they were on target to eliminate the “appropriate” groups among the Cossacks. They turned to “normalizing” those who remained under the heading of “eliminating the Cossacks as a socioeconomic class.”30 They thereby shamelessly sought to justify their ethnic-based massacres by incorporating them into the rubric of the “class struggle.”

  MORE TERROR

  The Communists were unrelenting in their pursuit of “class enemies.” Membership in a class was not defined “subjectively,” that is, by one’s values and social aims, but rather by “objective” socioeconomic conditions. It did not matter if members of the middle class, for example, were willing to change their attitude and even to embrace the Soviet system.

  For the Cheka, the concept of “class origins” was almost the same thing as that of “racial origins.” In November 1918, Martyn Latsis, one of the Cheka leaders, put it this way: “We are not waging war on individual persons. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. During the investigation, we do not look for evidence that the accused acted in deed or word against the Soviet power. The first questions you ought to put are: to what class does he belong? What is his origin? What is his education or profession? And it is
these questions that ought to determine the fate of the accused.” In May 1920, Felix Dzerzhinsky summed up the operating procedures of the Cheka as calling for “the terrorization, arrest, and extermination of enemies of the revolution on the basis of their class affiliation or of their pre-revolutionary roles.”31

  The classic account of the terror at the local level was published in the 1920s by the Russian émigré S. P. Melgounov. He had been a Social Revolutionary, but he had no need to exaggerate the horrors, and much of the evidence he used had been published in the Bolshevik press. His detailed and shocking account has been confirmed by recent revelations from the Russian archives and by historians.32

  As the Cheka retook a village or town, they raped, murdered, and pillaged. Hostages taken to extort food or gold were often shot anyway. In a matter of months, thousands were executed. Historians only hazard guesses about the total, but in the Crimea, after General Wrangel (who had succeeded Denikin) was put down at the end of 1920, somewhere between 50,000 and 150,000 were shot or hanged. The witch hunt continued afterward, stoked by Lenin, who talked about how up to 300,000 more “spies and secret agents” in the Crimea should be tracked down and “punished.”33

  Large numbers of White troops and their supposed sympathizers were taken prisoner and sent to concentration camps, where an unknown number perished. A hundred thousand prisoners and an additional number of Cossacks were expelled from their lands and held near Yekaterinburg. In November 1920 a note from the Cheka there reported on the “incredible conditions” in the camps. At the same time thirty-seven thousand prisoners of Wrangel’s army were held in Kharkov, and their situation was so bad that even the Cheka asked Lenin what could be done to improve things. He gave no answer, but his terse response was the same one he gave whenever he decided to do nothing. He scribbled on the note that it be shelved and sent “to the archive.”34

  FAMINE AND FAILURE TO EXPORT REVOLUTION

  Lenin and his comrades believed that by its very nature, Socialist revolution could not, and should not, be restricted to Russia. It is true that Stalin was more skeptical about revolution in the West and for that reason wanted peace with the Germans in January 1918.35 He was at least in this judgment out of step with the Leninist viewpoint, according to which the Bolsheviks would lead the workers of the world in a grand and final assault on international capitalism. Thus, for the Russian Revolution to finish what it started, similar upheavals had to occur in the West and eventually throughout the world. The Soviets were encouraged by some rebellions in Germany, Austria, and elsewhere, but these were easily put down. When people in Europe were given a choice, most wanted nothing to do with Communism.

  By the end of 1919, Lenin and the Bolsheviks grew bolder in their ambitions to spread Communism to the West. The new Polish government under Marshal Józef Pilsudski, deeply anti-Communist and anti-Russian, became increasingly aggressive. By January 1920, Trotsky was already anticipating an attack and wrote Lenin of the need to mobilize Polish Communists for the front. Both sides threatened war.36

  Pilsudski struck first, sending his armies into action on April 26. By early May they had captured Kiev, but by June 13 not only had the Polish advance been stopped, it had begun to be reversed. Russian patriots, even military men who despised the Reds, responded to the threat, and a vigorous campaign soon pushed the Poles back. Lenin was not alone in thinking they could turn the fury into a “revolutionary war” through which he would bring Communist revolution to the West.37

  The scale of Lenin’s illusions was monumental. His view was that he would liberate the Polish working class and bring Socialism there, as well as to other countries, such as Hungary, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Austria, and Germany. Convinced that the working classes in all these countries would greet the Red Army as liberators, he ordered it to pursue the retreating Polish forces. On July 19, 1920, the Second Congress of the Communist International (Comintern) met with all the signs pointing to victory. The congress sent its greetings to the Red Army and said it was fighting “not only in the interest of Soviet Russia, but also in the interest of all laboring mankind, for the Communist International.” Delegates, like Lenin, fully anticipated that revolution would sweep Poland and the rest of Europe. But the Communists completely miscalculated the reaction of the Poles, who, far from greeting the Red Army, rallied to the flag as the Reds approached Warsaw on August 12. Four days later Pilsudski led a successful counteroffensive, and the war closed to the disadvantage of the Soviet Union.38

  Lenin never admitted his colossal error in judgment, and he was not alone. Even “moderates” like Nikolai Bukharin, though surprised by the war, soon favored carrying the campaign beyond Warsaw, “right up to London and Paris.”39

  While the Red Army was on Russia’s western front, still more peasant uprisings broke out in disparate parts of the country. The Communists, forever concerned to identify conspiracies, labeled these “kulak revolts,” but the hundreds of isolated events actually represented last-ditch efforts to resist the Soviet system.

  The requisitioning brigades sent out to the countryside to collect foodstuffs used methods that brought torment and affliction. The amount of food demanded far exceeded what peasants could deliver, but the brigades tried to extort “hidden food” by using torture, public humiliation, rape, and pillage.

  The food supply problem continued to worsen because the civil war disrupted the rural economy. Nevertheless, the Communists who turned up in villages demanded more, not less, to the point that the peasants were driven to starvation. Secret reports of the Cheka on public opinion (svodki) in the countryside reveal a swell of feeling against the Communist system. Armed with what they could find, the peasants banded together and in 1920 killed an estimated eight thousand members of the “requisition” teams. Word spread, and peasant armies numbering into the tens of thousands came together.40

  The leaders of these rebellions were men like Alexander Antonov, who had previously fought for the Reds against the Whites. He had almost the entire Tambov Province behind him. In other parts of rural Russia, peasant armies rolled back Moscow’s control. By early 1921, Antonov himself had gathered a force estimated between twenty and fifty thousand.41

  The Communist regime was also faced with workers who could take no more of the harsh measures and went on strike. There was a protest of ten thousand in Moscow on February 23, 1921, and the example was followed in Petrograd. Workers called for liberation from oppression and the return of freedom of speech, press, and assembly. These were alarming developments for Communist leaders, who were doubly shocked when mutinies broke out at the Kronstadt naval base.

  The sailors there were renowned for their support of the Bolsheviks during the coup in 1917, and their mutiny was symbolic of the backlash across the country. The sailors held out until March 17, when the rebellion was savagely put down. Red Army troops back from Poland, led by the hard-nosed general Mikhail Tukhachevsky, captured thousands, who were deported to the camps. There they suffered a lingering death or were executed.

  The Tenth Party Congress of the Communist Party met at this very time (beginning on March 8, 1921) in Moscow. Lenin admitted that the peasant uprisings against Communist taxation policy were worrisome and realized that he would have to back off somewhat. His proposal was that the peasants pay tax in kind, instead of having to submit to “requisitions,” that they be allowed to sell some of what they produced once the tax was paid, and that the tax itself be reduced. There was concern among some in the Party that Lenin might be advocating a return to capitalism.

  But his proposals were reluctantly accepted as the New Economic Policy, or NEP—on which more below. No doubt the events in Kronstadt helped to convince doctrinaire members of the Party of the necessity of supporting the changed approach, but they bent to the uncomfortable facts ever so grudgingly.

  Tukhachevsky was given a month to pacify the Tambov Province and began operations in late May. By June he had deployed a force of over a hundred thousand, but that number was insuf
ficient, because the guerrillas relied on the sympathies of the population. To break the back of that support, the Red Army engaged in systematic terror. Thousands of hostages, including members of families of known guerrillas, were thrown into hastily constructed concentration camps in order to force peasant soldiers to give themselves up. Lenin supported the cruelest measures.42

  By mid-June, Antonov’s army had been surrounded and destroyed, and he himself was eventually tracked down and killed. Although the full casualties suffered in Tambov Province will never be known, estimates suggest that around a hundred thousand were imprisoned or deported and as many as fifteen thousand executed.43

  The violence and destruction of the revolution and the civil war left the country’s economy in a shambles, with production in large-scale industry in 1921 reduced to one-fifth of what it had been in 1913.44 It was as bad or worse in the countryside. In 1920, the harvest was around half its pre-1914 levels, and the next year it was down still more.45 The countryside also suffered from drought in 1920 and 1921 that affected the Volga Basin, the Asiatic frontier, and southern Ukraine and produced widespread famine. It was a normal practice in areas like the Volga for peasants to prepare for periodic droughts by setting aside enough grain to tide them over. However, such “surpluses” were now requisitioned, even when the area was hit by famine. The new Soviet government, refusing to acknowledge the serious situation, continued to export grain. Moreover, even though the NEP, which was supposed to alleviate the burden on peasants, was officially under way, requisitions continued with devastating effects.