The End of the Romanoffs

Nicholas, Alexandra, & Their Children

By Robert H. Williams

Source: http://codoh.com/library/document/2296

With the threat of „international Socialism,“ the textbook name for Communism, so imminent in the Western world, nothing could be more important to the future survival and freedom of our children than to show them who set up the bloody Communist regime over the Russians and how they did it.

But you can hardly find the facts in the libraries anymore and the big publishing houses no longer dare publish such life-saving information. Great hordes of the Marxist indoctrinated internationalists who secretly engineered, or whose associated and racial kinsmen engineered, the rise of Bolshevism in Russia, poured into America, both before and since the 1917 Communist revolution; and these revolutionaries are so well entrenched in Washington, they have such a powerful propaganda and smear machine and they control so much of the department store advertising-that hardly a single politician or publisher will dare relate the significant facts about how their machine destroyed Russia.

Eye-Witness Report

 

I want to quote at some length from one of the best books ever written on the Bolshevik Revolution, The Last Days of the Romanoffs [sic], by George Gustav Tellberg, Professor of Law in Saratov University and former Minister of Justice of the Russian Government at Omsk, and Robert Wilton, long-time Russian correspondent to the London Times. The book was published in the United States in 1920 by George H. Doran Company.

I believe one of the most valuable contributions I could make to human freedom would be to make this information available again to all who will read it.

The fly leaf shows that the book was copyrighted in 1920 by both the George H. Doran Company and the Curtis Publishing Company (publisher of the Saturday Evening Post).

This book gives transcripts of a court of inquiry and photostatic evidence identifying the murderers of the Czar and his family, and shows incidentally, but authentically, that a certain small group of less than a dozen Jews, by controlling the secret police, held the whip hand over the entire Soviet regime.

It may be news to you that there ever was such a thing as a court of inquiry held on the scene of the murder of the Czar and his family. There was such a court, and Wilton, the co- author of the book, was present throughout the inquiry as correspondent of the London Times.

It came about this way: The White Russian army, the army of the anti-Bolshevik government set up in Siberia, recaptured the town of Ekaterinburg a few days after the royal Romanoffs were murdered in that town; and the Siberian Government set up the court to find the murderers. The investigators got several signed confessions from some of the guards who participated, one in the actual murder, the others in scrubbing up the bloody floors and walls after the assassination.

Before the Siberian Government could apprehend more than a handful of the guilty – these only the indoctrinated, propagandized soldiers on guard who did only what they were told – the Red Army again took Ekaterinburg; but fortunately for the world, Wilton escaped with the entire court dossier. He released its essentials in the book I quote herein. The official record is here; but where can you find a copy of this valuable book today? To get one you have to make a deliberate search, whereas it ought to be required reading in every high school. Not three teachers, preachers or political „leaders“ out of a hundred know these facts – yet to know them might enable us to prevent the international revolutionaries from destroying America.

Soviets Seized Power

 

The Royal family, including Czar Nicholas II, Empress Alexandra Feodorovna, their son and their four daughters, together with such servants as had been permitted to remain with them, were held prisoners in the province of Omsk. Czar Nicholas, a highly religious Russian of kindly but weak character, had been hoodwinked into resigning in the „February Revolution“ of 1917. After his resignation the „soviets“ or committees of Marxist indoctrinated, unionized workmen sprang up like poison mushrooms, everywhere, organized almost overnight by some unseen force. All these soviets were bent on destroying the existing order and establishing a socialistic government. They seized or dominated the governments of many cities and towns and out of this revolutionary force rose the weak Socialist leader, Kerensky.

For nearly half a century Zionist agents had been indoctrinating the seven or eight million Jews in Russia with Marxism. (The late Chaim Weizmann, one of the principal leaders of these agents, in his autobiography, Trial and Error, tells us that the Pale of Settlement, the vast area which was virtually a Jewish land, was seething with revolutionaries of all varieties, those who wanted to seize the government of Russia and those who held that the best course for the Jews was to establish a nation of their own in Palestine.)

The soviets were themselves a Jewish innovation, and as their power grew in the cities, towns and villages, they seized telegraph and telephone exchanges and railroad centers and though some of them, notably east of the Urals, resisted Jewish domination, generally these committees were dominated, openly or covertly, by their Jewish inspirers, and thus they put the Jewish revolutionaries in a powerful position to terrorize any opposition.

Throughout most of 1917- to the October Revolution – Kerensky remained head of the new government, but the German government, being at war with Russia, France, Britain and the United States, wanted to put Russia out of the war; so that government allowed the Bolshevik leaders, Lenin, and associates, to pass in a sealed train from Switzerland through Germany into Sweden, whence they infiltrated Russia. With support from inside the Social Democratic party and many of the Jewish-run soviets, Lenin, joined by Trotsky from New York, and other world Bolshevik leaders, gained the upper hand over the Kerensky government. Wilton touches on these historic events as he unfolds the tragedy of the Romanoffs.

German Government Soon Regretted

 

By the spring of 1918 the German government (as well as the Allies) was alarmed at the rise of Bolshevik power and its blood-letting, as well as its threat to spread throughout Europe. The Bolsheviks had obliged Germany by taking Russia off her back, signing the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty. Now the Kaiser's government secretly decided to try to restore Nicholas II to the throne if he would endorse the peace treaty. It was necessary to get him back in Moscow, if the plan was to succeed.

Wilton claimed that Mirbach, the German agent in Moscow, still had great influence over the Red government, especially since so many military leaders and former government officials, and provincial governments not yet destroyed, were willing to work with any force that might counter the Bolsheviks and perhaps restore the monarchy.

On some ruse, Mirbach persuaded Sverdlov to send an envoy to bring Nicholas to Moscow. After all, it would strengthen the position of the Bolshevik usurpers if the Czar could be „tried“ and found guilty of treason or anything. Or if the Czar would agree to endorse the peace treaty, the Allies would then no longer try to restore Nicholas as a means of getting Russia back into the war.

Sverdlov sent one Yankel Yakovlev [as] „Bolshevik commissar to the imperial family.“ He arrived at Tobolsk, where the Romanoffs were held, April 22, 1918. He could not persuade Nicholas to agree to sanction the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty, which Nicholas considered an eternal disgrace to Russia, but he did persuade the ex-Czar to return to Moscow. They got as far as Ekaterinburg, in the Urals, where the train was halted by the Viral Regional Soviet, or revolutionary committee.

The Red Power Jewish

 

The soviet was dominated by „Goloshchekin, Safarov, Voikov and Syromolotov, all four Jews.“ They used a Russian named Beloborodov as figurehead president, a criminal, threatened by them with exposure and death for his crime. „He was henceforth a mere straw man, kept in his place to deceive the obstreperous Uralian miners, who did not wish to be ruled from Moscow, much less by Jews.“

Goloshchekin was a member of Sverdlov's secret police, the Chrezvychaika, [and] an old comrade and fellow revolutionary of Sverdlov's. Telegrams and records at the telephone exchange, seized by the court of inquiry after the White Russian army captured Ekaterinburg, showed that the soviet was at all times in touch with their Jewish boss, Sverdlov in Moscow.

It was Sverdlov, master of the Chrezvychaika and head of the Tsik, strong man of the Red government, who ordered Yakovlev to take the Romanoffs via Ekaterinburg. Wilton suggests that Sverdlov must have been tipped off by friends in Germany that the German government was secretly planning to oust him and restore the monarchy.

Wilton might have been more specific, for it was well known by the time his book was published that [it was] the German Jewish bankers, the Warburgs (the family which now is so influential over the White House) and the Jewish prime minister of Germany, who induced the Kaiser's government to let the exiled Bolsheviks, Lenin and party, return to Russia through Germany in a sealed train. Sverdlov himself had been associated with the group in Germany and evidently was chosen by them.

Sverdlov, as president of the Tsik, was over the foreign as well as domestic affairs of Sovietism, being in fact, Prime Minister.

Taken according to numbers of population, the Jews represented one in ten (in Russia); among the komisors [commissars] that rule Bolshevist Russia they are nine in ten.

In addition to Sverdlov, the Chrezvychaika (inquisition) was run by Goloshchekin, Yurovsky, Efremov, Chustkevich and three other Jews.

The Ural Regional Soviet relieved Yakovlev of the prisoners and held them in a local mansion. Presently the commander of the guard, who had been a fanatical anti-Czar revolutionary, began to change, seeing the modest nature of Nicholas and his devotion to Russia and especially his concern for the peasants. He let sisters from a local Catholic institution bring fresh eggs and vegetables to the royal family.

Sworn Confession

 

But Sverdlov had other plans for the royal family. He put Yurovsky in charge. Yurovsky is described as a drunken Jewish criminal, whose own mother opposed and feared him. Yurovsky relieved the Russian commander and moved all Russian soldiers off the premises, to adjoining houses, replacing them inside and immediately outside the prison house with foreign revolutionaries.

Count Mirbach, the agent of the German government in Moscow, was killed the second week in July. His murderers later were identified as men from Sverdlov's secret police.

On July 17 (by the western calendar) Yurovsky took all pistols away from the Russian soldiers and told them if they heard firing during the night not to be alarmed.

Here is part of the sworn confession by one of the guardsmen who participated in the murder, one Pavel Medvedoff:

A new commandant was assigned: his name was Iourovsky (Yurovsky) … In the evening of July 16 … Iourovsky announced to me: „We will have to shoot them all tonight; notify the guardsmen not to be alarmed if they should hear the shots.“

About midnight Iourovsky woke up the czar's family … In about an hour the whole family, the doctor, the maid and two waiters got up, washed and dressed themselves…

Shortly after 1 o'clock in the night the czar, czaritza, their four daughters, the maid, the doctor, the cook and the waiter left their rooms. The czar carried the heir in his arms. The emperor and heir were dressed in „gimnosterkas“ (soldiers' shirts) and wore caps … During my presence nobody of the czar's family asked anybody any questions. They did not either weep or cry. Having descended the stairs to the first floor, we went out into the court, and from there by the second door … we entered the lower floor of the house …

One chair was given to the emperor, one to the empress, and the third to the heir. The empress sat by the wall with the window, near the back pillar of the arch. Behind her stood three of her daughters. (I knew their faces very well because I saw them every day when they were walking, but I didn't know them by name). The heir and the emperor sat side by side, almost in the middle of the room. Dr. Batkin stood behind the heir. The maid, a very tall woman, stood by the left post of the door leading to the storeroom; by her side stood one of the czar's daughters (the fourth). Two servants stood at the left from the entrances of the room, against the wall separating the storeroom …

None Asked for Mercy

 

It looked as if all of them guessed their fate, but not a single sound was uttered. At the same time eleven men entered the room: Iourovsky, his assistant, two members of the extraordinary commission, and seven Letts. (Note: Wilton did not believe they were Letts, as they wrote notes in Magyar, mysteriously poor Magyar – RHW). Iouravsky ordered me to leave, saying, „Go to the street, see if there is anybody there and if the shots can be heard.“

I went out to the court which was enclosed by a fence, and before I could get out to the street I heard the firing. (Note: The court of inquiry had evidence that the witness was lying at this point; that he himself participated in the murder – RHW). Immediately I returned to the house (only two or three minutes having elapsed), and on entering the room where the execution took place, I saw all the members of the czar's family lying on the floor, having many wounds in their bodies. The blood was running in streams, the doctor, the maid and the waiters were also shot. When I entered, the heir was still alive and moaning. Iourovsky went up and fired two or three more times at him. The heir grew still …

After the assassination Iourovsky said to me that I was to bring some guardsmen to wash up the blood in the room … At three o'clock in the morning everything was in order. Then Iourovsky went to his room and I went to the guardroom.

I woke up at eight o'clock and went to the commandant's room. I met there the president of the district soviet, Beloborodoff (the figurehead president – RHW) and Commissar Goloshchekin and Ivan Starkoff … All the rooms in the house were in disorder … Suitcases and trunks were opened. Piles of gold and silver things were laid on the tables of the commandant's room. Objects of jewelry which were taken from the members of the czar's family just before the murder, were also there; as well as things that were on them after their death … I took also several silver rings and a few other trifles.

Answering the question as to where the bodies of the killed were taken … Ermakoff explained to me that the bodies were thrown down the shaft of a mine near the Verkh Issetsk works and after that the shaft was destroyed by bombs or explosives in order to fill it up.

One of the Russian soldiers, Philip Proskouriakoff, signed a sworn statement that he was called in immediately after the assassination to help scrub up the floors. He described the scene as he found it; and said Medvedoff told him immediately after the crime that Yurovsky had told the czar just before shooting him, „Your race must cease to live.“

Other witnesses gave other versions of Yurovsky's last words to the czar. Wilton reports: „Voikov, the Jew, boasted to his 'lady' friends in Ekaterinburg after the murder that 'the world will never know what we did with the bodies.’“

Fragments of Bodies Identified

 

The bodies were so completely destroyed that the investigators found only fragments of them. But identification was positive. False teeth, crown jewels overlooked by the murderers and readily recognized personal possessions were found both outside and inside the mine shaft, with finger bones and other body fragments, and fragments of clothing.

Wilton's comments (early in his book) on the seat of power in the Red government are of special interest because Wilton had spent many years in Russia as a newspaper man, his business that of gathering information; and he had the benefit of the anti-Communist officials and ex-officials and agencies. He states:

As there was no apparent authority, the local bodies [soviets – RHW] often acted independently; indeed, Lenin encouraged this tendency. Vlast na mestakh (every place its own master) was his motto. Lenin did not rule; the Soviet system was governed by other people, the fellow-passengers who came with him under German auspices. Though he delivered impassioned harangues before the Sovnarkom and received deputations from minor soviets, the real power was elsewhere – in the Tsik and Chrezvychaika.

Mirbach [the agent of the German government in Moscow-RHW] received his daily report from the Chrezvychaika. He was murdered by two men who said they came from that office. Lenin had as little to do with his death as he had with the murders, a week later, of the ex-Tsar and his family. The Red Okhrana and the inner circle of the Tsik were the veritable authors of the crime of Ekaterinburg, and probably of Mirbach's assassination.

Nonentities, figureheads of the sovnarkom, do not interest us. We are concerned with great, if maleficent, personages in the Red world. Most of them are still unknown outside the ranks of the professional revolutionaries. A goodly proportion of the hundred Jews who came out of Germany with Lenin, and the hundreds who came from Chicago, deserve to be included in this gallery, for they … held Russia under their sway. To enumerate and describe them would require a small volume. I need sketch only those who act prominently in the drama of Ekaterinburg. The most important were Sverdlov, Safarov, Voikov and Goloshchekin, and the murderer-in-chief Yurovsky.

Sverdlov Supreme

 

The names of Safarov and Voikov figure in the list of Lenin's fellow passengers [from Switzerland through Germany in 1917 – RHW). Both are very powerful Bolshevists, holding high places in the executive and police branches. Sverdlov is – I use the present tense because all these persons continue to wield their influence to the present day – the uncrowned Tsar of the Soviets. His authority is really much higher than that of Lenin or even Trotsky. He dominates the Tsik and his creatures rule the Chrezvychaika.

(Wilton evidently wrote the above paragraph a short time before Sverdlov's assassination and finished the manuscript after the assassination – RHW.)

The closest personal bonds had existed for many years between Goloshchekin and Sverdlov. They had been together in prison and exile. Goloshchekin ranked as an internationalist of the most pronounced type …He was bloodthirsty to an abnormal degree, even for a Red chieftain. People who knew him at Ekaterinburg described Goloshchekin as a homicidal sadist He never attended executions, but insisted upon hearing a detailed account of them. He huddled in bed shivering and quaking till the executioner came with his report, and would listen to his description of tortures: with a frenzy of joy, begging for further details, gloating over the expressions, gestures and death-throes of the victims as they passed before his diseased vision.

The origins of Yurovsky have been fully investigated. His parents and relatives – all poor Jews – remained in Siberia after the murderer and his chiefs and accomplices had fled from Ekaterinburg. He had been a watchmaker at Tomsk, scarcely able to make ends meet. Naturally ambitious, he despised the people around him. He was waiting for an opportunity. It came suddenly and mysteriously. Yurovsky disappeared. This was before the war. He is next heard of in Ekaterinburg as a photographic dealer. It leaked out that he had been to Berlin and became possessed of some capital. When war came he evaded service in the trenches by qualifying as a Red Cross assistant (feldsher) and remained in Ekaterinburg. When the Bolshevists seized the government, Yurovsky became one of the local agents of the new power.

Yankel (Jacob) Sverdlov, the Red Tsar … was despised and later killed by Russian workmen.

There were upwards of seven million Jews in Russia at the time of the Bolshevik revolution, according to Jewish writers. There are today, in America, „a good two-thirds of all the Jews of the world,“ according to one of their most eminent leaders – which means ten to twelve million.

Many of these Jews have found such wealth and freedom in America that they do not want Communism or any advanced system of Socialism. But others band themselves together in the most powerful smear and terrorist organizations that ever existed in any nation in history, evidently determined to rule or ruin.

Potential „Soviets“ in U.S.

 

How will they bring about the destruction of the benevolent republic, the nation of free men which is the last hope of this age?

We are not wise enough to foresee which of the several systems of potential Red „soviets“ they will use – perhaps the labor union or the Anti-Defamation League locals or the „civil defense“ police.

We must be on guard against all of them. And the only way to guard against them is to make enough people understand the origin and nature of the world revolution in which we of this generation are caught. This brief glimpse of the tragedy of Russia might help alert our people.

---

(The above article has been reprinted, with the author's permission, from the January 1957 issue of the Williams Intelligence Summary [Vol. 9, no. 2].)

The Jewish Role in the Bolshevik Revolution and Russia's Early Soviet Regime

Assessing the Grim Legacy of Soviet Communism

Source: http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v14/v14n1p-4_Weber.html

by Mark Weber

In the night of July 16-17, 1918, a squad of Bolshevik secret police murdered Russia's last emperor, Tsar Nicholas II, along with his wife, Tsaritsa Alexandra, their 14-year-old son, Tsarevich Alexis, and their four daughters. They were cut down in a hail of gunfire in a half-cellar room of the house in Ekaterinburg, a city in the Ural mountain region, where they were being held prisoner. The daughters were finished off with bayonets. To prevent a cult for the dead Tsar, the bodies were carted away to the countryside and hastily buried in a secret grave.

Bolshevik authorities at first reported that the Romanov emperor had been shot after the discovery of a plot to liberate him. For some time the deaths of the Empress and the children were kept secret. Soviet historians claimed for many years that local Bolsheviks had acted on their own in carrying out the killings, and that Lenin, founder of the Soviet state, had nothing to do with the crime.

In 1990, Moscow playwright and historian Edvard Radzinsky announced the result of his detailed investigation into the murders. He unearthed the reminiscences of Lenin's bodyguard, Alexei Akimov, who recounted how he personally delivered Lenin's execution order to the telegraph office. The telegram was also signed by Soviet government chief Yakov Sverdlov. Akimov had saved the original telegraph tape as a record of the secret order.¹

Radzinsky's research confirmed what earlier evidence had already indicated. Leon Trotsky -- one of Lenin's closest colleagues -- had revealed years earlier that Lenin and Sverdlov had together made the decision to put the Tsar and his family to death. Recalling a conversation in 1918, Trotsky wrote:²

My next visit to Moscow took place after the [temporary] fall of Ekaterinburg [to anti-Communist forces]. Speaking with Sverdlov, I asked in passing: „Oh yes, and where is the Tsar?“

„Finished,“ he replied. „He has been shot.“

„And where is the family?“

„The family along with him.“

„All of them?,“ I asked, apparently with a trace of surprise.

„All of them,“ replied Sverdlov. „What about it?“ He was waiting to see my reaction. I made no reply.

„And who made the decision?,“ I asked.

„We decided it here. Ilyich [Lenin] believed that we shouldn't leave the Whites a live banner to rally around, especially under the present difficult circumstances.“

I asked no further questions and considered the matter closed.

Recent research and investigation by Radzinsky and others also corroborates the account provided years earlier by Robert Wilton, correspondent of the London Times in Russia for 17 years. His account, The Last Days of the Romanovs - originally published in 1920, and reissued in 1993 by the Institute for Historical Review -- is based in large part on the findings of a detailed investigation carried out in 1919 by Nikolai Sokolov under the authority of „White“ (anti-Communist) leader Alexander Kolchak. Wilton's book remains one of the most accurate and complete accounts of the murder of Russia's imperial family.³

A solid understanding of history has long been the best guide to comprehending the present and anticipating the future. Accordingly, people are most interested in historical questions during times of crisis, when the future seems most uncertain. With the collapse of Communist rule in the Soviet Union, 1989-1991, and as Russians struggle to build a new order on the ruins of the old, historical issues have become very topical. For example, many ask: How did the Bolsheviks, a small movement guided by the teachings of German-Jewish social philosopher Karl Marx, succeed in taking control of Russia and imposing a cruel and despotic regime on its people?

In recent years, Jews around the world have been voicing anxious concern over the specter of anti-Semitism in the lands of the former Soviet Union. In this new and uncertain era, we are told, suppressed feelings of hatred and rage against Jews are once again being expressed. According to one public opinion survey conducted in 1991, for example, most Russians wanted all Jews to leave the country.⁴ But precisely why is anti-Jewish sentiment so widespread among the peoples of the former Soviet Union? Why do so many Russians, Ukrainians, Lithuanians and others blame „the Jews“ for so much misfortune?

A Taboo Subject

Although officially Jews have never made up more than five percent of the country's total population,⁵ they played a highly disproportionate and probably decisive role in the infant Bolshevik regime, effectively dominating the Soviet government during its early years. Soviet historians, along with most of their colleagues in the West, for decades preferred to ignore this subject. The facts, though, cannot be denied.

With the notable exception of Lenin (Vladimir Ulyanov), most of the leading Communists who took control of Russia in 1917-20 were Jews. Leon Trotsky (Lev Bronstein) headed the Red Army and, for a time, was chief of Soviet foreign affairs. Yakov Sverdlov (Solomon) was both the Bolshevik party's executive secretary and -- as chairman of the Central Executive Committee -- head of the Soviet government. Grigori Zinoviev (Radomyslsky) headed the Communist International (Comintern), the central agency for spreading revolution in foreign countries. Other prominent Jews included press commissar Karl Radek (Sobelsohn), foreign affairs commissar Maxim Litvinov (Wallach), Lev Kamenev (Rosenfeld) and Moisei Uritsky.⁶

Lenin himself was of mostly Russian and Kalmuck ancestry, but he was also one-quarter Jewish. His maternal grandfather, Israel (Alexander) Blank, was a Ukrainian Jew who was later baptized into the Russian Orthodox Church.⁷

A thorough-going internationalist, Lenin viewed ethnic or cultural loyalties with contempt. He had little regard for his own countrymen. „An intelligent Russian,“ he once remarked, „is almost always a Jew or someone with Jewish blood in his veins.“⁸

Critical Meetings

In the Communist seizure of power in Russia, the Jewish role was probably critical.

Two weeks prior to the Bolshevik „October Revolution“ of 1917, Lenin convened a top secret meeting in St. Petersburg (Petrograd) at which the key leaders of the Bolshevik party's Central Committee made the fateful decision to seize power in a violent takeover. Of the twelve persons who took part in this decisive gathering, there were four Russians (including Lenin), one Georgian (Stalin), one Pole (Dzerzhinsky), and six Jews.⁹

To direct the takeover, a seven-man „Political Bureau“ was chosen. It consisted of two Russians (Lenin and Bubnov), one Georgian (Stalin), and four Jews (Trotsky, Sokolnikov, Zinoviev, and Kamenev).¹⁰ Meanwhile, the Petersburg (Petrograd) Soviet -- whose chairman was Trotsky -- established an 18-member „Military Revolutionary Committee“ to actually carry out the seizure of power. It included eight (or nine) Russians, one Ukrainian, one Pole, one Caucasian, and six Jews.¹¹ Finally, to supervise the organization of the uprising, the Bolshevik Central Committee established a five-man „Revolutionary Military Center“ as the Party's operations command. It consisted of one Russian (Bubnov), one Georgian (Stalin), one Pole (Dzerzhinsky), and two Jews (Sverdlov and Uritsky).¹²

Contemporary Voices of Warning

Well-informed observers, both inside and outside of Russia, took note at the time of the crucial Jewish role in Bolshevism. Winston Churchill, for one, warned in an article published in the February 8, 1920, issue of the London Illustrated Sunday Herald that Bolshevism is a „worldwide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilization and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality.“ The eminent British political leader and historian went on to write:¹³

There is no need to exaggerate the part played in the creation of Bolshevism and in the actual bringing about of the Russian Revolution by these international and for the most part atheistical Jews. It is certainly a very great one; it probably outweighs all others. With the notable exception of Lenin, the majority of the leading figures are Jews. Moreover, the principal inspiration and driving power comes from the Jewish leaders. Thus Tchitcherin, a pure Russian, is eclipsed by his nominal subordinate, Litvinoff, and the influence of Russians like Bukharin or Lunacharski cannot be compared with the power of Trotsky, or of Zinovieff, the Dictator of the Red Citadel (Petrograd), or of Krassin or Radek -- all Jews. In the Soviet institutions the predominance of Jews is even more astonishing. And the prominent, if not indeed the principal, part in the system of terrorism applied by the Extraordinary Commissions for Combatting Counter-Revolution [the Cheka] has been taken by Jews, and in some notable cases by Jewesses

Needless to say, the most intense passions of revenge have been excited in the breasts of the Russian people.

David R. Francis, United States ambassador in Russia, warned in a January 1918 dispatch to Washington: „The Bolshevik leaders here, most of whom are Jews and 90 percent of whom are returned exiles, care little for Russia or any other country but are internationalists and they are trying to start a worldwide social revolution.“¹⁴

The Netherlands' ambassador in Russia, Oudendyke, made much the same point a few months later: „Unless Bolshevism is nipped in the bud immediately, it is bound to spread in one form or another over Europe and the whole world as it is organized and worked by Jews who have no nationality, and whose one object is to destroy for their own ends the existing order of things.“¹⁵

„The Bolshevik Revolution,“ declared a leading American Jewish community paper in 1920, „was largely the product of Jewish thinking, Jewish discontent, Jewish effort to reconstruct.“¹⁶

As an expression of its radically anti-nationalist character, the fledgling Soviet government issued a decree a few months after taking power that made anti-Semitism a crime in Russia. The new Communist regime thus became the first in the world to severely punish all expressions of anti-Jewish sentiment.¹⁷ Soviet officials apparently regarded such measures as indispensable. Based on careful observation during a lengthy stay in Russia, American-Jewish scholar Frank Golder reported in 1925 that „because so many of the Soviet leaders are Jews anti-Semitism is gaining [in Russia], particularly in the army [and] among the old and new intelligentsia who are being crowded for positions by the sons of Israel.“¹⁸

Historians' Views

Summing up the situation at that time, Israeli historian Louis Rapoport writes:¹⁹

Immediately after the [Bolshevik] Revolution, many Jews were euphoric over their high representation in the new government. Lenin's first Politburo was dominated by men of Jewish origins

Under Lenin, Jews became involved in all aspects of the Revolution, including its dirtiest work. Despite the Communists' vows to eradicate anti-Semitism, it spread rapidly after the Revolution -- partly because of the prominence of so many Jews in the Soviet administration, as well as in the traumatic, inhuman Sovietization drives that followed. Historian Salo Baron has noted that an immensely disproportionate number of Jews joined the new Bolshevik secret police, the Cheka And many of those who fell afoul of the Cheka would be shot by Jewish investigators.

The collective leadership that emerged in Lenin's dying days was headed by the Jew Zinoviev, a loquacious, mean-spirited, curly-haired Adonis whose vanity knew no bounds.

„Anyone who had the misfortune to fall into the hands of the Cheka,“ wrote Jewish historian Leonard Schapiro, „stood a very good chance of finding himself confronted with, and possibly shot by, a Jewish investigator.“²⁰ In Ukraine, „Jews made up nearly 80 percent of the rank-and-file Cheka agents,“ reports W. Bruce Lincoln, an American professor of Russian history.²¹ (Beginning as the Cheka, or Vecheka) the Soviet secret police was later known as the GPU, OGPU, NKVD, MVD and KGB.)

In light of all this, it should not be surprising that Yakov M. Yurovksy, the leader of the Bolshevik squad that carried out the murder of the Tsar and his family, was Jewish, as was Sverdlov, the Soviet chief who co-signed Lenin's execution order.²²

Igor Shafarevich, a Russian mathematician of world stature, has sharply criticized the Jewish role in bringing down the Romanov monarchy and establishing Communist rule in his country. Shafarevich was a leading dissident during the final decades of Soviet rule. A prominent human rights activist, he was a founding member of the Committee on the Defense of Human Rights in the USSR.

In Russophobia, a book written ten years before the collapse of Communist rule, he noted that Jews were „amazingly“ numerous among the personnel of the Bolshevik secret police. The characteristic Jewishness of the Bolshevik executioners, Shafarevich went on, is most conspicuous in the execution of Nicholas II:²³

This ritual action symbolized the end of centuries of Russian history, so that it can be compared only to the execution of Charles I in England or Louis XVI in France. It would seem that representatives of an insignificant ethnic minority should keep as far as possible from this painful action, which would reverberate in all history. Yet what names do we meet? The execution was personally overseen by Yakov Yurovsky who shot the Tsar; the president of the local Soviet was Beloborodov (Vaisbart); the person responsible for the general administration in Ekaterinburg was Shaya Goloshchekin. To round out the picture, on the wall of the room where the execution took place was a distich from a poem by Heine (written in German) about King Balthazar, who offended Jehovah and was killed for the offense.

In his 1920 book, British veteran journalist Robert Wilton offered a similarly harsh assessment:²⁴

The whole record of Bolshevism in Russia is indelibly impressed with the stamp of alien invasion. The murder of the Tsar, deliberately planned by the Jew Sverdlov (who came to Russia as a paid agent of Germany) and carried out by the Jews Goloshchekin, Syromolotov, Safarov, Voikov and Yurovsky, is the act not of the Russian people, but of this hostile invader.

In the struggle for power that followed Lenin's death in 1924, Stalin emerged victorious over his rivals, eventually succeeding in putting to death nearly every one of the most prominent early Bolsheviks leaders - including Trotsky, Zinoviev, Radek, and Kamenev. With the passage of time, and particularly after 1928, the Jewish role in the top leadership of the Soviet state and its Communist party diminished markedly.

Put To Death Without Trial

For a few months after taking power, Bolshevik leaders considered bringing „Nicholas Romanov“ before a „Revolutionary Tribunal“ that would publicize his „crimes against the people“ before sentencing him to death. Historical precedent existed for this. Two European monarchs had lost their lives as a consequence of revolutionary upheaval: England's Charles I was beheaded in 1649, and France's Louis XVI was guillotined in 1793.

In these cases, the king was put to death after a lengthy public trial, during which he was allowed to present arguments in his defense. Nicholas II, though, was neither charged nor tried. He was secretly put to death - along with his family and staff -- in the dead of night, in an act that resembled more a gangster-style massacre than a formal execution.

Why did Lenin and Sverdlov abandon plans for a show trial of the former Tsar? In Wilton's view, Nicholas and his family were murdered because the Bolshevik rulers knew quite well that they lacked genuine popular support, and rightly feared that the Russian people would never approve killing the Tsar, regardless of pretexts and legalistic formalities.

For his part, Trotsky defended the massacre as a useful and even necesssary measure. He wrote:²⁵

The decision [to kill the imperial family] was not only expedient but necessary. The severity of this punishment showed everyone that we would continue to fight on mercilessly, stopping at nothing. The execution of the Tsar's family was needed not only in order to frighten, horrify, and instill a sense of hopelessness in the enemy but also to shake up our own ranks, to show that there was no turning back, that ahead lay either total victory or total doom This Lenin sensed well.

Historical Context

In the years leading up to the 1917 revolution, Jews were disproportionately represented in all of Russia's subversive leftist parties.²⁶ Jewish hatred of the Tsarist regime had a basis in objective conditions. Of the leading European powers of the day, imperial Russia was the most institutionally conser-vative and anti-Jewish. For example, Jews were normally not permitted to reside outside a large area in the west of the Empire known as the „Pale of Settlement.“²⁷

However understandable, and perhaps even defensible, Jewish hostility toward the imperial regime may have been, the remarkable Jewish role in the vastly more despotic Soviet regime is less easy to justify. In a recently published book about the Jews in Russia during the 20th century, Russian-born Jewish writer Sonya Margolina goes so far as to call the Jewish role in supporting the Bolshevik regime the „historic sin of the Jews.“²⁸ She points, for example, to the prominent role of Jews as commandants of Soviet Gulag concentration and labor camps, and the role of Jewish Communists in the systematic destruction of Russian churches. Moreover, she goes on, „The Jews of the entire world supported Soviet power, and remained silent in the face of any criticism from the opposition.“ In light of this record, Margolina offers a grim prediction:

The exaggeratedly enthusiastic participation of the Jewish Bolsheviks in the subjugation and destruction of Russia is a sin that will be avenged Soviet power will be equated with Jewish power, and the furious hatred against the Bolsheviks will become hatred against Jews.

If the past is any indication, it is unlikely that many Russians will seek the revenge that Margolina prophecies. Anyway, to blame „the Jews“ for the horrors of Communism seems no more justifiable than to blame „white people“ for Negro slavery, or „the Germans“ for the Second World War or „the Holocaust.“

Words of Grim Portent

Nicholas and his family are only the best known of countless victims of a regime that openly proclaimed its ruthless purpose. A few weeks after the Ekaterinburg massacre, the newspaper of the fledgling Red Army declared:²⁹

Without mercy, without sparing, we will kill our enemies by the scores of hundreds, let them be thousands, let them drown themselves in their own blood. For the blood of Lenin and Uritskii let there be floods of blood of the bourgeoisie -- more blood, as much as possible.

Grigori Zinoviev, speaking at a meeting of Communists in September 1918, effectively pronounced a death sentence on ten million human beings: „We must carry along with us 90 million out of the 100 million of Soviet Russia's inhabitants. As for the rest, we have nothing to say to them. They must be annihilated.“³⁰

'The Twenty Million'

As it turned out, the Soviet toll in human lives and suffering proved to be much higher than Zinoviev's murderous rhetoric suggested. Rarely, if ever, has a regime taken the lives of so many of its own people.³¹

Citing newly-available Soviet KGB documents, historian Dmitri Volkogonov, head of a special Russian parliamentary commission, recently concluded that „from 1929 to 1952 21.5 million [Soviet] people were repressed. Of these a third were shot, the rest sentenced to imprisonment, where many also died.“³²

Olga Shatunovskaya, a member of the Soviet Commission of Party Control, and head of a special commission during the 1960s appointed by premier Khrushchev, has similarly concluded: „From January 1, 1935 to June 22, 1941, 19,840,000 enemies of the people were arrested. Of these, seven million were shot in prison, and a majority of the others died in camp.“ These figures were also found in the papers of Politburo member Anastas Mikoyan.

Robert Conquest, the distinguished specialist of Soviet history, recently summed up the grim record of Soviet „repression“ of it own people:³⁴

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the post-1934 death toll was well over ten million. To this should be added the victims of the 1930-1933 famine, the kulak deportations, and other anti-peasant campaigns, amounting to another ten million plus. The total is thus in the range of what the Russians now refer to as 'The Twenty Million'.“

A few other scholars have given significantly higher estimates.³⁵

The Tsarist Era in Retrospect

With the dramatic collapse of Soviet rule, many Russians are taking a new and more respectful look at their country's pre-Communist history, including the era of the last Romanov emperor. While the Soviets -- along with many in the West -- have stereotypically portrayed this era as little more than an age of arbitrary despotism, cruel suppression and mass poverty, the reality is rather different. While it is true that the power of the Tsar was absolute, that only a small minority had any significant political voice, and that the mass of the empire's citizens were peasants, it is worth noting that Russians during the reign of Nicholas II had freedom of press, religion, assembly and association, protection of private property, and free labor unions. Sworn enemies of the regime, such as Lenin, were treated with remarkable leniency.³⁶

During the decades prior to the outbreak of the First World War, the Russian economy was booming. In fact, between 1890 and 1913, it was the fastest growing in the world. New rail lines were opened at an annual rate double that of the Soviet years. Between 1900 and 1913, iron production increased by 58 percent, while coal production more than doubled.³⁷ Exported Russian grain fed all of Europe. Finally, the last decades of Tsarist Russia witnessed a magnificent flowering of cultural life.

Everything changed with the First World War, a catastrophe not only for Russia, but for the entire West.

Monarchist Sentiment

In spite of (or perhaps because of) the relentless official campaign during the entire Soviet era to stamp out every uncritical memory of the Romanovs and imperial Russia, a virtual cult of popular veneration for Nicholas II has been sweeping Russia in recent years.

People have been eagerly paying the equivalent of several hours' wages to purchase portraits of Nicholas from street vendors in Moscow, St. Petersburg and other Russian cities. His portrait now hangs in countless Russian homes and apartments. In late 1990, all 200,000 copies of a first printing of a 30-page pamphlet on the Romanovs quickly sold out. Said one street vendor: „I personally sold four thousand copies in no time at all. It's like a nuclear explosion. People really want to know about their Tsar and his family.“ Grass roots pro-Tsarist and monarchist organizations have sprung up in many cities.

A public opinion poll conducted in 1990 found that three out of four Soviet citizens surveyed regard the killing of the Tsar and his family as a despicable crime.³⁸ Many Russian Orthodox believers regard Nicholas as a martyr. The independent „Orthodox Church Abroad“ canonized the imperial family in 1981, and the Moscow-based Russian Orthodox Church has been under popular pressure to take the same step, in spite of its long-standing reluctance to touch this official taboo. The Russian Orthodox Archbishop of Ekaterinburg announced plans in 1990 to build a grand church at the site of the killings. „The people loved Emperor Nicholas,“ he said. „His memory lives with the people, not as a saint but as someone executed without court verdict, unjustly, as a sufferer for his faith and for orthodoxy.“³⁹

On the 75th anniversary of the massacre (in July 1993), Russians recalled the life, death and legacy of their last Emperor. In Ekaterinburg, where a large white cross festooned with flowers now marks the spot where the family was killed, mourners wept as hymns were sung and prayers were said for the victims.⁴⁰

Reflecting both popular sentiment and new social-political realities, the white, blue and red horizontal tricolor flag of Tsarist Russia was officially adopted in 1991, replacing the red Soviet banner. And in 1993, the imperial two-headed eagle was restored as the nation's official emblem, replacing the Soviet hammer and sickle. Cities that had been re-named to honor Communist figures -- such as Leningrad, Kuibyshev, Frunze, Kalinin, and Gorky -- have re-acquired their Tsarist-era names. Ekaterinburg, which had been named Sverdlovsk by the Soviets in 1924 in honor of the Soviet-Jewish chief, in September 1991 restored its pre-Communist name, which honors Empress Catherine I.

Symbolic Meaning

In view of the millions that would be put to death by the Soviet rulers in the years to follow, the murder of the Romanov family might not seem of extraordinary importance. And yet, the event has deep symbolic meaning. In the apt words of Harvard University historian Richard Pipes:⁴¹

The manner in which the massacre was prepared and carried out, at first denied and then justified, has something uniquely odious about it, something that radically distinguishes it from previous acts of regicide and brands it as a prelude to twentieth-century mass murder.

Another historian, Ivor Benson, characterized the killing of the Romanov family as symbolic of the tragic fate of Russia and, indeed, of the entire West, in this century of unprecedented agony and conflict.

The murder of the Tsar and his family is all the more deplorable because, whatever his failings as a monarch, Nicholas II was, by all accounts, a personally decent, generous, humane and honorable man.

The Massacre's Place in History

The mass slaughter and chaos of the First World War, and the revolutionary upheavals that swept Europe in 1917-1918, brought an end not only to the ancient Romanov dynasty in Russia, but to an entire continental social order. Swept away as well was the Hohenzollern dynasty in Germany, with its stable constitutional monarchy, and the ancient Habsburg dynasty of Austria-Hungary with its multinational central European empire. Europe's leading states shared not only the same Christian and Western cultural foundations, but most of the continent's reigning monarchs were related by blood. England's King George was, through his mother, a first cousin of Tsar Nicholas, and, through his father, a first cousin of Empress Alexandra. Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm was a first cousin of the German-born Alexandra, and a distant cousin of Nicholas.

More than was the case with the monarchies of western Europe, Russia's Tsar personally symbolized his land and nation. Thus, the murder of the last emperor of a dynasty that had ruled Russia for three centuries not only symbolically presaged the Communist mass slaughter that would claim so many Russian lives in the decades that followed, but was symbolic of the Communist effort to kill the soul and spirit of Russia itself.
 

Notes

 

1.      Edvard Radzinksy, The Last Tsar (New York: Doubleday, 1992), pp. 327, 344-346.; Bill Keller, „Cult of the Last Czar,“ The New York Times, Nov. 21, 1990.

2.      From an April 1935 entry in „Trotsky's Diary in Exile.“ Quoted in: Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1990), pp. 770, 787.; Robert K. Massie, Nicholas and Alexandra (New York: 1976), pp. 496-497.; E. Radzinksy, The Last Tsar (New York: Doubleday, 1992), pp. 325-326.; Ronald W. Clark, Lenin (New York: 1988), pp. 349-350.

3.      On Wilton and his career in Russia, see: Phillip Knightley, The First Casualty (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), pp. 141-142, 144-146, 151-152, 159, 162, 169, and, Anthony Summers and Tom Mangold, The File on the Tsar (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), pp. 102-104, 176.

4.      AP dispatch from Moscow, Toronto Star, Sept. 26, 1991, p. A2.; Similarly, a 1992 survey found that one-fourth of people in the republics of Belarus (White Russia) and Uzbekistan favored deporting all Jews to a special Jewish region in Russian Siberia. „Survey Finds Anti-Semitism on Rise in Ex-Soviet Lands,“ Los Angeles Times, June 12, 1992, p. A4.

5.      At the turn of the century, Jews made up 4.2 percent of the population of the Russian Empire. Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (New York: 1990), p. 55 (fn.).
By comparison, in the United States today, Jews make up less than three percent of the total population (according to the most authoritative estimates).

6.      See individual entries in: H. Shukman, ed., The Blackwell Encyclopedia of the Russian Revolution (Oxford: 1988), and in: G. Wigoder, ed., Dictionary of Jewish Biography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991).
The prominent Jewish role in Russia's pre-1914 revolutionary underground, and in the early Soviet regime, is likewise confirmed in: Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter, Roots of Radicalism (New York: Oxford, 1982), pp. 92-94.
In 1918, the Bolshevik Party's Central Committee had 15 members. German scholar Herman Fehst -- citing published Soviet records -- reported in his useful 1934 study that of six of these 15 were Jews. Herman Fehst, Bolschewismus und Judentum: Das jüdische Element in der Führerschaft des Bolschewismus (Berlin: 1934), pp. 68-72.; Robert Wilton, though, reported that in 1918 the Central Committee of the Bolshevik party had twelve members, of whom nine were of Jewish origin and three were of Russian ancestry. R. Wilton, The Last Days of the Romanovs (IHR, 1993), p. 185.

7.      After years of official suppression, this fact was acknowledged in 1991 in the Moscow weekly Ogonyok. See: Jewish Chronicle (London), July 16, 1991.; See also: Letter by L. Horwitz in The New York Times, Aug. 5, 1992, which cites information from the Russian journal „Native Land Archives.“; „Lenin's Lineage?“'Jewish,' Claims Moscow News,“ Forward (New York City), Feb. 28, 1992, pp. 1, 3.; M. Checinski, Jerusalem Post (weekly international edition), Jan. 26, 1991, p. 9.

8.      Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1990), p. 352.

9.      Harrison E. Salisbury, Black Night, White Snow: Russia's Revolutions, 1905-1917 (Doubleday, 1978), p. 475.; William H. Chamberlin, The Russian Revolution (Princeton Univ. Press, 1987), vol. 1, pp. 291-292.; Herman Fehst, Bolschewismus und Judentum: Das jüdische Element in der Führerschaft des Bolschewismus (Berlin: 1934), pp. 42-43.; P. N. Pospelov, ed., Vladimir Ilyich Lenin: A Biography (Moscow: Progress, 1966), pp. 318-319.
This meeting was held on October 10 (old style, Julian calendar), and on October 23 (new style). The six Jews who took part were: Uritsky, Trotsky, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Sverdlov and Soklonikov.
The Bolsheviks seized power in Petersburg on October 25 (old style) -- hence the reference to the „Great October Revolution“ -- which is November 7 (new style).

10.  William H. Chamberlin, The Russian Revolution (1987), vol. 1, p. 292.; H. E. Salisbury, Black Night, White Snow: Russia's Revolutions, 1905-1917 (1978), p. 475.

11.  W. H. Chamberlin, The Russian Revolution, vol. 1, pp. 274, 299, 302, 306.; Alan Moorehead, The Russian Revolution (New York: 1965), pp. 235, 238, 242, 243, 245.; H. Fehst, Bolschewismus und Judentum (Berlin: 1934), pp. 44, 45.

12.  H. E. Salisbury, Black Night, White Snow: Russia's Revolutions, 1905-1917 (1978), p. 479-480.; Dmitri Volkogonov, Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991), pp. 27-28, 32.; P. N. Pospelov, ed., Vladimir Ilyich Lenin: A Biography (Moscow: Progress, 1966), pp. 319-320.

13.  „Zionism versus Bolshevism: A struggle for the soul of the Jewish people,“ Illustrated Sunday Herald (London), February 8, 1920. Facsimile reprint in: William Grimstad, The Six Million Reconsidered (1979), p. 124. (At the time this essay was published, Churchill was serving as minister of war and air.)

14.  David R. Francis, Russia from the American Embassy (New York: 1921), p. 214.

15.  Foreign Relations of the United States -- 1918 -- Russia, Vol. 1 (Washington, DC: 1931), pp. 678-679.

16.  American Hebrew (New York), Sept. 1920. Quoted in: Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot (Cambridge, Mass.: 1963), p. 268.

17.  C. Jacobson, „Jews in the USSR“ in: American Review on the Soviet Union, August 1945, p. 52.; Avtandil Rukhadze, Jews in the USSR: Figures, Facts, Comment (Moscow: Novosti, 1978), pp. 10-11.

18.  T. Emmons and B. M. Patenaude, eds., War, Revolution and Peace in Russia: The Passages of Frank Golder, 1913-1927 (Stanford: Hoover Institution, 1992), pp. 320, 139, 317.

19.  Louis Rapoport, Stalin's War Against the Jews (New York: Free Press, 1990), pp. 30, 31, 37. See also pp. 43, 44, 45, 49, 50.

20.  Quoted in: Salo Baron, The Russian Jews Under Tsars and Soviets (New York: 1976), pp. 170, 392 (n. 4).

21.  The Atlantic, Sept. 1991, p. 14.;
In 1919, three-quarters of the Cheka staff in Kiev were Jews, who were careful to spare fellow Jews. By order, the Cheka took few Jewish hostages. R. Pipes, The Russian Revolution (1990), p. 824.; Israeli historian Louis Rapoport also confirms the dominant role played by Jews in the Soviet secret police throughout the 1920s and 1930s. L. Rapoport, Stalin's War Against the Jews (New York: 1990), pp. 30-31, 43-45, 49-50.

22.  E. Radzinsky, The Last Tsar (1992), pp. 244, 303-304.; Bill Keller, „Cult of the Last Czar,“ The New York Times, Nov. 21, 1990.; See also: W. H. Chamberlin, The Russian Revolution, vol. 2, p. 90.

23.  Quoted in: The New Republic, Feb. 5, 1990, pp. 30 ff.; Because of the alleged anti-Semitism of Russophobia, in July 1992 Shafarevich was asked by the National Academy of Sciences (Washington, DC) to resign as an associate member of that prestigious body.

24.  R. Wilton, The Last Days of the Romanovs (1993), p. 148.

25.  Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (1990), p. 787.; Robert K. Massie, Nicholas and Alexandra (New York: 1976), pp. 496-497.

26.  An article in a 1907 issue of the respected American journal National Geographic reported on the revolutionary situation brewing in Russia in the years before the First World War: „ The revolutionary leaders nearly all belong to the Jewish race, and the most effective revolutionary agency is the Jewish Bund „ W. E. Curtis, „The Revolution in Russia,“ The National Geographic Magazine, May 1907, pp. 313-314.
Piotr Stolypin, probably imperial Russia's greatest statesman, was murdered in 1911 by a Jewish assassin. In 1907, Jews made up about ten percent of Bolshevik party membership. In the Menshevik party, another faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, the Jewish proportion was twice as high. R. Pipes, The Russian Revolution (1990), p. 365.; See also: R. Wilton, The Last Days of the Romanovs (1993), pp. 185-186.

27.  Martin Gilbert, Atlas of Jewish History (1977), pp. 71, 74.; In spite of the restrictive „Pale“ policy, in 1897 about 315,000 Jews were living outside the Pale, most of them illegally. In 1900 more than 20,000 were living in the capital of St. Petersburg, and another 9,000 in Moscow.

28.  Sonja Margolina, Das Ende der Lügen: Russland und die Juden im 20. Jahrhundert (Berlin: 1992). Quoted in: „Ein ganz heisses Eisen angefasst,“ Deutsche National-Zeitung (Munich), July 21, 1992, p. 12.

29.  Krasnaia Gazetta („Red Gazette“), September 1, 1918. Quoted in: Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (1990), pp. 820, 912 (n. 88).

30.  Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (New York: 1990), p. 820.

31.  Contrary to what a number of western historians have for years suggested, Soviet terror and the Gulag camp system did not begin with Stalin. At the end of 1920, Soviet Russia already had 84 concentration camps with approximately 50,000 prisoners. By October 1923 the number had increased to 315 camps with 70,000 inmates. R. Pipes, The Russian Revolution (1990), p. 836.

32.  Cited by historian Robert Conquest in a review/ article in The New York Review of Books, Sept. 23, 1993, p. 27.

33.  The New York Review of Books, Sept. 23, 1993, p. 27.

34.  Review/article by Robert Conquest in The New York Review of Books, Sept. 23, 1993, p. 27.; In the „Great Terror“ years of 1937-1938 alone, Conquest has calculated, approximately one million were shot by the Soviet secret police, and another two million perished in Soviet camps. R. Conquest, The Great Terror (New York: Oxford, 1990), pp. 485-486.;
Conquest has estimated that 13.5 to 14 million people perished in the collectivization („dekulakization“) campaign and forced famine of 1929-1933. R. Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow (New York: Oxford, 1986), pp. 301-307.

35.  Russian professor Igor Bestuzhev-Lada, writing in a 1988 issue of the Moscow weekly Nedelya, suggested that during the Stalin era alone (1935-1953), as many as 50 million people were killed, condemned to camps from which they never emerged, or lost their lives as a direct result of the brutal „dekulakization“ campaign against the peasantry. „Soviets admit Stalin killed 50 million,“ The Sunday Times, London, April 17, 1988.;
R. J. Rummel, a professor of political science at the University of Hawaii, has recently calculated that 61.9 million people were systematically killed by the Soviet Communist regime from 1917 to 1987. R. J. Rummel, Lethal Politics: Soviet Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1917 (Transaction, 1990).

36.  Because of his revolutionary activities, Lenin was sentenced in 1897 to three years exile in Siberia. During this period of „punishment,“ he got married, wrote some 30 works, made extensive use of a well-stocked local library, subscribed to numerous foreign periodicals, kept up a voluminous correspondence with supporters across Europe, and enjoyed numerous sport hunting and ice skating excursions, while all the time receiving a state stipend. See: Ronald W. Clark, Lenin (New York: 1988), pp. 42-57.; P. N. Pospelov, ed., Vladimir Ilyich Lenin: A Biography (Moscow: Progress, 1966), pp. 55-75.

37.  R. Pipes, The Russian Revolution (1990), pp. 187-188.;

38.  The Nation, June 24, 1991, p. 838.

39.  Bill Keller, „Cult of the Last Czar,“ The New York Times, Nov. 21, 1990.

40.  „Nostalgic for Nicholas, Russians Honor Their Last Czar,“ Los Angeles Times, July 18, 1993.; „Ceremony marks Russian czar's death,“ Orange County Register, July 17, 1993.

41.  R. Pipes, The Russian Revolution (1990), p. 787.
 

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From The Journal of Historical Review, Jan.-Feb. 1994 (Vol. 14, No. 1), pages 4-22.

About the Author

Mark Weber was born and raised in Portland, Oregon. He studied history at the University of Illinois (Chicago), the University of Munich, Portland State University and Indiana University (M.A., 1977).

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