November 05, 2005

“Stalin’s Willing
Executioners”?
By Kevin MacDonald

[Also by Kevin MacDonald: Thinking about

Neoconservatism; Was the 1924 Immigration Cut-
off “Racist”?; Immigration And The Unmentionable
Question Of Ethnic Interests]

Yuri Slezkine’s book The Jewish Century, which

appeared last year to rapturous reviews, is an
intellectual tour de force, alternately muddled and
brilliant, courageous and apologetic. Slezkine’s
greatest accomplishment is to set the historical
record straight on the importance of Jews in the
Bolshevik Revolution and its aftermath. He
summarizes previously available data and extends
our understanding of the Jewish role in
revolutionary movements before 1917 and of Soviet
society thereafter. His book provides a fascinating
chronicle of the Jewish rise to elite status in all
areas of Soviet society—culture, the universities,
professional occupations, the media, and
government. Indeed, the book is also probably the
best, most up-to-date account of Jewish economic
and cultural pre-eminence in Europe (and America)
that we have.

The once-common view that the Bolshevik

Revolution was a Jewish revolution and that the
Soviet Union was initially dominated by Jews has
now been largely eliminated from modern academic
historiography. The current view, accepted by
almost all contemporary historians, is that Jews
played no special role in Bolshevism and indeed,
were uniquely victimized by it.

Slezkine’s book provides a bracing corrective to this

current view.

Slezkine himself [email him] is a Russian immigrant

of partially Jewish extraction. Arriving in America in
1983, he moved quickly into elite U.S. academic
circles and is now a professor at U.C. Berkeley. This,
his second book, is his first on a major theme.

While the greater part of The Jewish Century is an

exposition of the Russian experience, Slezkine
provides what are in effect sidebars (comparatively
flimsy) recounting the Jewish experience in America
and the Middle East. Together, these phenomena
can in fact be seen as the three great Jewish
migrations of the 20th century, since within Russia
millions of Jews left the shtetl towns of the Pale of
Settlement, migrating to Moscow and the other
cities to man elite positions in the Soviet state.

Slezkine attempts to understand Jewish history and

the rise of Jews to elite status in the 20th century by
developing the thesis that the peoples of the world
can be classified into two groups.

The successful peoples of the modern world, termed

Mercurians, are urban, mobile, literate, articulate,
and intellectually sophisticated.

The second group, termed Apollonians, is rooted to

the land with traditional agrarian cultures, valuing
physical strength and warrior virtues.

Since Slezkine sees Jews as the quintessential

Mercurians, modernization is essentially a process of
everyone becoming Jewish. Indeed, Slezkine
regards both European individualism and the
European nation state as imitations of pre-existing
Jewish accomplishments—both deeply problematic
views, in my opinion.

There are problems with the Mercurian/Apollonian

distinction as well. The Gypsies whom he offers as
an example of another Mercurian people, are
basically the opposite of Jews: having a low-
investment, low-IQ reproductive style characterized
by higher fertility, earlier onset of reproduction,
more unstable pair bonds, and more single
parenting.

The Overseas Chinese, another proposed parallel,

are indeed highly intelligent and entrepreneurial,
like the Jews. But I would argue the aggressiveness
of the Jews, compared to the relative political
passivity of the Overseas Chinese, invalidates the
comparison.

We do not read of Chinese cultural movements

dominating the major local universities and media
outlets, subjecting the traditional culture of
Southeast Asians and anti-Chinese sentiment to
radical critique —or of Chinese organizations
campaigning for the removal of native cultural and
religious symbols from public places.

Moreover, the vast majority of Jews in Eastern

Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries were hardly the modern Mercurians that
Slezkine portrays.

Well into the 20th century, as Slezkine himself notes,

most Eastern European Jews could not speak the
languages of the non-Jews living around them.
Slezkine also ignores their medieval outlook on life,
their obsession with the Kabbala—the writings of
Jewish mystics—their superstition and anti-
rationalism, and their belief in magical remedies and
exorcisms.

And these supposedly modern Mercurians had an

attitude of absolute faith in the person of the tsadik,
their rebbe, who was a charismatic figure seen by
his followers literally as the personification of God in
the world.

Slezkine devotes one line to the fact that Jewish

populations in Eastern Europe had the highest rate
of natural increase of any European population in
the nineteenth century. The grinding poverty that
this produced caused an upsurge of fundamentalist
extremism that coalesced in the Hasidic movement
and, later in the nineteenth century, into political
radicalism and Zionism as solutions to Jewish
problems.

By proposing the basically spurious

Mercurian/Apollonian contrast, Slezkine obscures
the plain fact that Jewish history in the period he
discusses constitutes a spectacularly, arguably
uniquely, successful case of what I have described
as an ethnocentric group competitive strategy in
action.

Slezkine conceptualizes Mercurianism as a

worldview and therefore a matter of psychological
choice rather than a set of psychological
mechanisms, notably general intelligence and
ethnocentrism. He appears to be aware of the
biological reality of kinship and ethnicity, but he
steadfastly pursues a cultural determinism model.
As a result of this false premise, he understates the
power of ethnocentrism and group competitiveness
as unifying factors in Jewish history.

This competitiveness was of course notorious in

Eastern Europe before the 1917 revolution. Slezkine
ignores, or at least does not spell out, the extent to
which Jews were willing agents of exploitative elites
in traditional societies, not only in Europe, but in the
Muslim world as well. Forming alliances with
exploitative elites is arguably the most reliably
recurrent theme observable in Jewish economic
behavior over the ages.

Indeed, Slezkine shows that this pattern effectively

continued in Russia after the Revolution: Jews
became part of a new exploitative elite. But here
boundaries between Jews and non-Jews were
unusually blurred—in traditional societies, barriers
between Jews and non-Jews at all social levels were
always high.

Slezkine supposes that Jews and other Mercurians

performed economic tasks deemed inappropriate for
the natives for religious reasons. But this is only
part of the story. Often these were situations where
the natives were simply comparatively less ruthless
in exploiting their fellows, which put them at a
competitive disadvantage. This was especially the
case in Eastern Europe, where conducive economic
arrangements, such as tax farming, estate
management, and monopolies on retail liquor
distribution, lasted far longer than in the West.

Slezkine also ignores the extent to which Jewish

competition may have suppressed — arguably
sometimes reversed — the formation of a native
middle class in Eastern Europe. He seems instead to
simply assume the locals lacked the abilities
required.

But the fact is that in most of Western Europe Jews

were expelled in the Middle Ages. And, as a result,
when modernization occurred, it was accomplished
with an indigenous middle class. Perhaps the
Christian taxpayers of England made a good
investment in their own future when they agreed to
pay King Edward I a massive tax of £116,346 in
return for expelling 2000 Jews in 1290. If, as in
Eastern Europe, Jews had won the economic
competition in most of these professions, there
might not have been a non-Jewish middle class in
England.

Although in the decades immediately before the

Russian Revolution Jews had already made
enormous advances in social and economic status, a
major contribution of Slezkine’s book is to document
that Communism was, indeed, “good for the
Jews.” After the Revolution, there was active
elimination of any remnants of the older order and
their descendants. Anti-Semitism was outlawed.
Jews benefited from “antibourgeois” quotas in
educational institutions and other forms of
discrimination against the middle class and
aristocratic elements of the old regime, which could
have competed with the Jews. While all other
nationalities, including Jews, were allowed and
encouraged to keep their ethnic identities, the
revolution maintained an anti-majoritarian attitude.
(Some might argue that the parallel with post ’65
Civil Rights Act America ironic!)

Beyond the issue of demonstrating that the Jews

benefited from the Revolution lies the more
important question of their role in implementing it.
Having achieved power and elite status, did their
traditional hostility to the leaders of the old regime,
and to the peasantry, contribute to the peculiarly
ghastly character of the early Soviet era?
On this question, Slezkine’s contribution is decisive.

Despite the important role of Jews among the

Bolsheviks, most Jews were not Bolsheviks before
the Revolution. However, Jews were prominent
among the Bolsheviks, and once the Revolution was
underway, the vast majority of Russian Jews
became sympathizers and active participants.

Jews were particularly visible in the cities and as

leaders in the army and in the revolutionary councils
and committees. For example, there were 23 Jews
among 62 Bolsheviks in the All-Russian Central
Executive Committee elected at the Second
Congress of Soviets in October, 1917. Jews were
leaders of the movement and to a great extent they
were its public face.

Their presence was particularly notable at the top

levels of the Cheka and OGPU (two successive
acronyms for the secret police). Here Slezkine
provides statistics on Jewish overrepresentation in
these organizations, especially in supervisory roles,
and quotes historian Leonard Shapiro’s comment
that “anyone who had the misfortune to fall
into the hands of the Cheka stood a very good
chance of finding himself confronted with and
possibly shot by a Jewish investigator.”

During the 1930s, Slezkine reports, the secret

police, now known as the NKVD, “was one of the
most Jewish of all Soviet institutions”, with 42
of the 111 top officials being Jewish. At this time 12
of the 20 NKVD directorates were headed by ethnic
Jews, including those in charge of State Security,
Police, Labor Camps, and Resettlement
(deportation).

The Gulag was headed by ethnic Jews from its

beginning in 1930 until the end of 1938, a period
that encompasses the worst excesses of the Great
Terror.

They were, in Slezkine’s remarkable phrase,

“Stalin’s willing executioners”.

Slezkine appears to take a certain pride in the

drama of the role of the Jews in Russia during these
years. Thus he says they were

“among the most exuberant crusaders

against ‘bourgeois’ habits during the
Great Transformation; the most
disciplined advocates of socialist realism
during the ‘Great Retreat’ (from
revolutionary internationalism); and the
most passionate prophets of faith, hope,
and combat during the Great Patriotic
War against the Nazis”.

Sometimes his juxtapositions between his

descriptions of Jewish involvement in the horror of
the early Soviet period and the life styles of the
Jewish elite seem deliberately jarring. Lev Kopelev,
a Jewish writer who witnessed and rationalized the
Ukrainian famine in which millions died horrible
deaths of starvation and disease as an “historical
necessity” is quoted saying “You mustn’t give in
to debilitating pity. We are the agents of
historical necessity. We are fulfilling our
revolutionary duty.”

On the next page, Slezkine describes the life of the

largely Jewish elite in Moscow and Leningrad where
they attended the theater, sent their children to the
best schools, had peasant women (whose families
were often the victims of mass murder) for nannies,
spent weekends at pleasant dachas and vacationed
at the Black Sea.

Again, Slezkine discusses the heavily Jewish NKVD

and the Jewish leadership of the Great Terror of the
1930s. Then, he writes that in 1937 the prototypical
Jewish State official “probably would have been
living in elite housing in downtown
Moscow . . . with access to special stores, a
house in the country (dacha), and a live-in
peasant nanny or maid”. He writes long and
lovingly detailed sketches of life at the dachas of the
elite—the “open verandas overlooking small
gardens enclosed by picket fences…”

The reader is left on his own to recall the horrors of

the Ukrainian famine, the liquidation of the Kulaks,
and the Gulag.

Slezkine attempts to dodge the issue of the degree

to which the horrors perpetrated by the early Soviet
state were rooted in the traditional attitudes of the
Jews who in fact played such an extensive role in
their orchestration. He argues that the Jewish
Communists were Communists, not Jews.

This does not survive factual analysis.

One might grant the possibility that the

revolutionary vanguard was composed of Jews like
Trotsky, apparently far more influenced by a
universalist utopian vision than by their upbringing
in traditional Judaism. But, even granting this, it
does not necessarily follow for the millions of Jews
who left the shtetl towns, migrated to the cities, and
to such a large extent ran the USSR.

It strains credulity to suppose that these migrants

completely and immediately threw off all remnants
of the Eastern European shtetl culture—which, as
Slezkine acknowledges, had a deep sense of
estrangement from non-Jewish society, a fear and
hatred of peasants, hostility toward the Czarist
upper class, and a very negative attitude toward
Christianity.

In other words, the war against what Slezkine terms

“rural backwardness and religion” — major
targets of the Revolution — was exactly the sort of
war that traditional Jews would have supported
wholeheartedly, because it was a war against
everything they hated and thought of as oppressing
Jews.

However, while Slezkine seems comfortable with the

notion of revenge as a Jewish motive, he does not
consider traditional Jewish culture itself as a
possible contributor to Jewish behavior in the new
Communist state.

Moreover, while it was generally true that Jewish

servants of the Soviet regime had ceased being
religious Jews, this did not mean they ceased having
a Jewish identity. (Albert Lindeman made this point
when reviewing Slezkine in The American
Conservative [article not on line].)

Slezkine quotes the philosopher Vitaly Rubin

speaking of his career at a top Moscow school in the
1930s where over half the students were Jewish:

“Understandably, the Jewish question did

not arise there…All the Jews knew
themselves to be Jews but considered
everything to do with Jewishness a thing
of the past...There was no active desire
to renounce one’s Jewishness. The
problem simply did not exist.”

In other words, in the early decades of the Soviet

Union, the ruling class was so heavily a Jewish
milieu, that there was no need to renounce a Jewish
identity and no need to aggressively push for Jewish
interests. Jews had achieved elite status.

But ethnic networking continued nonetheless.

Indeed, Slezkine reports that when a leading Soviet
spokesmen on anti-Semitism, Yuri Larin (Lurie),
tried to explain the embarrassing fact that Jews
were, as he said, “preeminent, overabundant,
dominant, and so on” among the elite in the
Soviet Union, he mentioned the “unusually strong
sense of solidarity and a predisposition toward
mutual help and support”—ethnic networking by
any other name.

Obviously, “mutual help and support” required

that Jews recognize each other as Jews. Jewish
identity may not have been much discussed. But it
operated nonetheless, even if subconsciously, in the
rarified circles at the top of Soviet society.

Things changed. Slezkine shows that the apparent

de-emphasis of Jewish identity by many members of
the Soviet elite during the 1920s and 1930s turned
out to be a poor indicator of whether or not these
people identified as Jews—or would do so when
Jewish and Soviet identities began to diverge in
later years: when National Socialism reemphasized
Jewish identity, and when Israel emerged as a
magnet for Jewish sentiment and loyalty.

In the end, despite the rationalizations of many

Soviet Jews on Jewish identity in the early Soviet
period, it was blood that mattered.

After World War II, in a process which remains

somewhat obscure, the Russian majority began
taking back their country. One method was
“massive affirmative action” aimed at giving
greater representation to underrepresented ethnic
groups. Jews became targets of suspicion because
of their ethnic status. They were barred from some
elite institutions, and had their opportunities for
advancement limited. Overt anti-Semitism was
encouraged by the more covert official variety
apparent in the limits on Jewish advancement.

Under these circumstances, Slezkine says that Jews

became “in many ways, the core of the
antiregime intelligentsia”. Applications to leave
the USSR increased dramatically after Israel’s Six-
Day War of 1967 which, as in the United States and
Eastern Europe, resulted in an upsurge of Jewish
identification and ethnic pride. The floodgates were
eventually opened by Gorbachev in the late 1980s.
By 1994, 1.2 million Soviet Jews had emigrated—
43% of the total. By 2002, there were only 230,000
Jews remaining in the Russian Federation, 0.16% of
the population.

Nevertheless these remaining Jews remain

overrepresented among the elite. Six of the seven
oligarchs who emerged in control of the Soviet
economy and media in the period of de-
nationalization of the 1990s were Jews.

As mentioned above, Slezkine’s discussions of the

Jewish experience in the Middle East and America
are quite perfunctory in comparison.

Slezkine views the Jewish migration to Israel as

heroic and believes the moral debt owed to Jews by
Western societies justifies the most extreme
expressions of Jewish racialism:

“The rhetoric of ethnic homogeneity and

ethnic deportations, tabooed elsewhere
 in the West is a routine element of Israeli
political life… no other European state
can have as strong a claim on the West’s
moral imagination.”

He sees the moral taboo on European

ethnocentrism, the designation of Nazism as the
epitome of absolute evil, and the identification of
Jews as what he calls “the Chosen people of the
postwar Western world” as simply the inevitable
results of the events of World War II. In fact, of
course, the creation and maintenance of the culture
of the Holocaust and the special moral claims of
Jews and Israel might be more fairly viewed the
intended result of Jewish ethnic activism.

Slezkine’s caricature of American history is close to

preposterous. He sees the United States as a Jewish
promised land precisely because it is not defined
tribally and “has no state-bearing natives”. In
fact, of course, the Founding Fathers very explicitly
saw themselves as Englishmen defending a specific
political tradition. But (somewhat like the Soviet
Union’s Jews in the early decades) they felt no need
to assert the cultural and ethnic parameters of their
creation; they asssumed the racial and cultural
homogeneity of the Republic and perceived no
threat to its control by themselves and their
descendants.

And when the Founding Fathers’ descendents did

percieve such a threat, they reacted powerfully and
decisively, with the Know-Nothing movement in the
1850s and the Immigration Restriction (and
associated “Americanization” requirements) in
the early 20th Century Slezkine’s acceptance of the
“Proposition Nation” myth reflects the triumph of
intellectuals and propagandists, many of them
Jewish, led by Horace Kallen in the 1920s. These
succesfully replaced the previously standard view by
which many Americans thought of themselves as
members of a very successful ethnic group derived
from Great Britain and with strong cultural and
ethnic connections to Europe, particularly Northern
Europe.

The fate of Russia in the first two decades following

the Revolution prompts reflection on what might
have happened in the United States had American
communists and their sympathizers assumed power.
Sectors of American society might perhaps have
been deemed unacceptably backward and
superstitious and even worthy of mass murder by
the American counterparts of the Jewish elite in the
Soviet Union—the ones who journeyed to Ellis Island
instead of Moscow.

Those “red state” voters who have loomed so

important in recent national elections would have
been the enemy. The cultural and religious attitudes
of “red state” America are precisely those
attitudes that have been deemed changeworthy by
the left, particularly by the Jewish community,
which has been the driving force of the left in
America throughout the 20th century.
As Joel Kotkin points out, “for generations,
[American] Jews have viewed religious
conservatives with a combination of fear and
disdain.”

And, as Elliott Abrams had noted, the American

Jewish community “clings to what is at bottom a
dark vision of America, as a land permeated
with anti-Semitism…”

The dark view of traditional Slavs and their culture

that caused so many Eastern European shtetl Jews
to become “willing executioners” in the name of
international socialism is unmistakably related,
however remotely, to the views of some
contemporary American Jews about a majority of
their fellow countrymen.

Slezkine’s main point is that the most important

factor for understanding the history of the 20th
century is the rise of the Jews in the West and the
Middle East, and their rise and decline in Russia. I
think he is absolutely right about this.

If there is any lesson to be learned, it is that Jews

not only became an elite in all these areas, they
became a hostile elite—hostile to the traditional
people and cultures of all three areas they came to
dominate.

So far, the greatest human tragedies have occurred

in the Soviet Union. But the presence of Israel in the
Middle East is creating obvious dangers there. And
alienation remains a potent motive for the
disproportionate Jewish involvement in the
transformation of the U.S. into a non-European
society through non-traditional immigration.

Given this record of Jews as a very successful but

hostile elite, it is possible that the continued
demographic and cultural dominance of Western
European peoples will not be retained, either in
Europe or the United States, without a decline in
Jewish influence.

But the lesson of the Soviet Union (as also Spain

from the 15th–17th centuries) is that Jewish influence
does wane as well as wax. Unlike the attitudes of
the utopian ideologies of the 20th century, there is
no end to history.

Kevin MacDonald [email him] is Professor of

Psychology at California State University-Long
Beach. This article is adapted from a longer review
[pdf] published in the Fall 2005 issue of The
Occidental Quarterly.