Jews in the Russian Revolution

Is Communism a Jewish creation? Is it true that they used the Wall Street bankers’ support to cause the revolution of 1917 and effectively ruled the Soviet Union ? This theory is discussed below, with an extensive reply given by Patrick McNally Jr from California (a son of Patrick McNally of Japan ). It came out on an ad hoc discussion list initiated by an interesting man, Nilofer Bhagwat <nilouferin@vsnl. net so you can ask him to send you his letters.

(1)   Come Carpentier quotes Sutton

(2)   Shamir replies

(3)   McNally’s response

(1)   From Come Carpentier:

The top US Intelligence officers posted in Russia in the years 1917-1924 reported in detail how the Bolsheviks were supported and funded by their cousins in Wall Street who thought that they were thereby ruining Russia and annihilating its power, thus leaving no rival to the Anglo-American emerging alliance. That fact was acknowledged by Bertrand Russell, Winston Churchill and several other Western statesmen. The secret dispatches from the US agents can now be read in the US Archives and they provide names, amounts and a lot of other factual data.

Obviously I could not cite all the names in a few lines of comment. According to official Party statistics about 90 percent of all Bolshevik Commissars were Jewish in the first years of the Revolution. Solzhenitsyn is one of those who discussed it in his writings, not to condemn the Jewish people but to understand how to account for such a well established fact.

Likewise it has been established again and again by some impeccable American scholars devoid of bias (Mearsheimer, Walt, Petras etc...) that current US policies, especially the "war on terror" have been dictated by the Zionist Lobby which effectively rules America as it is predominant in the business-opinion forming elite. We are not tarring a people or a religion here, only a sectarian ideology and many Jews, both traditionally religious and modern secular recognise that assessment because it is the indisputable truth.

The majority of the first Bolshevik Commissars were related by  blood and interest to New York immigrants from Eastern Europe who were  active in the financial and stock market business. Coincidentally I met the descendants of at least of those Russian-born Wallstreeters who are still  very aware about their close kinships with Kamenev, Zinoviev, Trotsky  etc....(All had changed their names to look more "Russian"). These American  financiers powerfully supported and helped their relatives in the new Soviet  States and the relationship endured at least until the end of WWII (of  course it helped form the US-Soviet alliance against the Axis). The  Russian Revolution had its sincere promoters but it was backed by mighty  plutocratic interests which saw in it a unique opportunity to plunder and  dismember the Russian Empire for the benefit of the capitalist centres in   New York and London . This is now well known and acknowledged both in Russia and in Europe . Churchill and Bertrand Russell are among those who noticed  that the first Soviet state was run by often 'American-educated Slav Jews'  who have strong relationships on the other side of the Atlantic and are  engaged in extensive private business with their American and West European  contacts, despite appearances to the contrary. A reason (but not a  justification for Stalin's purges was the extensive amount of foreign  treasonous collusions within the Party which were ruining the Soviet economy.

(2) Shamir replied

 I must disagree with my friend Come regarding the Russian Revolution. Yes, there was an outdated view that the Jews were in majority in the Bolshevik leadership. This view was a prominent part of anti-Communist propaganda, and much of Western Right subscribed to it, as well as Russian émigrés.

But it was totally debunked by the modern Russian historians. Kozhinov is the best authority on it, and he analysed it very carefully. Kara-Murza followed him in his writing, and Alexandre Panarin as well. None of these three can be described as a philosemite, while the first one belonged to the right-wing school, the second to the left and the third to a Pravoslav one.

Alas, they were never translated into English. In this language, a chapter in Esau's Tears by Lindemann (not a philosemite) sums it up quite well. Jews were not prominent in the Bolshevik party prior to revolution - they mainly supported the Mensheviks if at all; that is why Stalin jokingly offered to do a pogrom in the party to allow Bolsheviks to win over Mensheviks. After the revolution, the Jews had a great success in Russia , as their natural competitors, Russian professional middle class, was decimated in the civil war. But the story of Yids forcing Communism on Russians is not accepted today - not by Russian nationalists, neither by Russian communists.

I cc this letter to Patrick McNally Jr of the US , who wrote much about it, hopefully he will provide more details in English.

(3) McNally replies:

I can't pretend to have familiarity with Kozhinov, Kara-Murza or Panarin. Maybe they will eventually be translated into English.

For now I'll accept Slezkine's description that in Russia :

The principal caveat to add here on Slezkine's book is that this is more of a philosophical tract than an actual historical study. It can sometimes be very misleading to depend too much on such books for anything which involves controversial issues. People seeking to establish a controversial thesis about the Red victory in Russia should be certain to place hard historical facts at the center.

The main distortion that frequently around statements such as Slezkine's above comment is made is that people mistakenly try to imply that a greater energy shown as Left-wing intellectuals among educated Russian Jews versus educated strata of other genealogy should somehow suggest that the ordinary Russian either supported the Whites in the civil war or at least didn't care about the outcome of the civil war, so that the carrying out of the Bolshevik revolution can be ascribed to a backdoor Jewish scheme and no more. That is certainly untenable.

Antony Sutton was mentioned by one of the people on this list. His book WALL STREET AND THE BOLSHEVIK REVOLUTION can be worth looking at only because it gives perhaps the best attempt to make logical arguments for traditionally ideological claims, but the main implications of his case fall flat when examined comprehensively.

Probably the first point in that book which stands out as a major alarm bell for most traditional readers is when Sutton discusses Trotsky's stay in New York and then his return to Russia . It's known that Kerensky had requested that Trotsky be allowed to return to Russia and Elizabeth Dilling had once pointed to this in arguing that Kerensky was carrying out a plan to place the Bolsheviks in power. What all such analyses miss is that Trotsky was not a Bolshevik at the time of his return to Russia . In the original Bolshevik/Menshevik split Trotsky first went with the Mensheviks and denounced Lenin's concept of how the revolutionary party should be organized; but then he later became disillusioned with the Mensheviks as allegedly pseudo-Marxists. The result was that for nearly 15 years Trotsky had advocated that the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks should be able to get back together while Lenin insisted on the need to draw sharp political lines separating Bolshevik from Menshevik. It did happen to occur that when Trotsky returned to Russia in 1917 he decided to join the Bolsheviks, but there was no way any outsider could have predicted this. Moreover, if the assassination attempts made against Lenin in 1917 had succeeded then this would have at least brought to the surface sooner the tensions between Trotsky and other traditional members of Lenin's Bolsheviki such as Stalin. If a real attempt by Wall Street financiers to place Lenin in power were made then these facts would have to be taken into account and it wouldn't make much sense to send someone like Trotsky back to Russia . Better just to give the aid directly to Lenin and keep intellectual rivals with whom he had unpredictable relations, such as Trotsky, out of the picture. Sutton's claims about Trotsky being given some financial aid during his stay in New York and his subsequent return are sufficiently modest to be believable. But they don't constitute evidence that anyone on Wall Street was seeking to aid Lenin in taking power. They indicate rather that one of Lenin's rivals may have received some aid in New York without anyone likely expecting that Trotsky would eventually join with Lenin.

We can also feel safe in ruling out any thesis which tries presenting Trotsky as a special agent working undercover for Wall Street against Lenin. Although charges of Trotsky having high-level ties with the government of the Third Reich appeared in the show trials of the 1930s, there have actually been very few political exiles in the last century who were so fully denied refugee status by so many governments. When the Whites were defeated and fled they generally had little or no problem gaining admission as exiles in Paris , Berlin or London . When Solzhenitsyn was exiled in the 1970s he had no difficulty with being admitted to the USA . Trotsky's case is quite distinct in the almost unanimous rejection of all his applications for political refugee status. If we were to postulate that somehow Trotsky had been working for Bernard Baruch as an infiltrator (just one version of a tall tale which circulates) then it would only make sense for Baruch or whoever to pull strings on Trotsky's behalf as a way of helping out the agent. Nothing anywhere supports such a view of things. What is perfectly plausible is that Trotsky did receive some aid in New York from people who understood him as a rival of Lenin, but without having any very tight strings attached. There are many other far more comprehensively established examples of this, such as the aid given to the Mujahideen in Afghanistan or Saddam Hussein in the 1980s. The volume of aid given out by Washington in these last cases certainly exceeds any aid which Trotsky may have received in New York .

Now once Trotsky made it back to Russia and decided that joining Lenin's party was the best option, new events began occurring. The Bolsheviks did seize power and that set off newer calculations. Sutton has a tendency to downplay the importance of the First World War in driving decisions and instead tries weaving things together into a wider picture which doesn't hold together. We know that Lenin had received some definite aid from the Kaiser (how much exactly is still argued) and this aid was motivated not by any specifically grandiose scheme to place Bolshevism in power per se, but simply by the wish to undermine the Provisional Government of Kerensky which was continuing the war effort against Germany. But it was also well-known that once Lenin took power his aim would be to spread revolutionary propaganda to the German soldiers and laborers in an effort to stir revolution within Germany . This set off a debate within Allied circles over what attitude to take towards the Bolsheviks. In the early stages a view which had some predominance argued that it was not worth trying to force Russia back into the war and that it would be better to establish good relations with the new Russian government while encouraging them to carry on revolutionary propaganda in Germany. The Bolsheviks showed great skill in playing upon such points to extract aid from conflicting sides in the war. According to Michael Occleshaw:

The Germans had not been idle in maintaining their influence with the Bolsheviks. As with the Allies, money was the tool which sustained it. In January 1918 N.M. Weinberg, a German-Jew, who was the agent in Petrograd for Mendelsohn & Co., the Berlin bankers, had paid the Bolshevik leaders 12 million roubles from the account of the German government.. . The money enabled the Bolsheviks to consolidate their position.

-- Michael Occleshaw, DANCES IN DEEP SHADOWS: THE CLANDESTINE WAR IN RUSSIA , 1917-20, p. 41.

The motive for this was clearly that the German government knew that they would have a better chance of reaching a settlement in the east if Lenin remained in power as opposed to someone like Kornilov.

On the other hand, Sutton cites an item from the WASHINGTON POST of February 2, 1918, which reported:

William B. Thompson, who was in Petrograd from July until November last, has made a personal contribution of $1,000,000 to the Bolsheviki for the purpose of spreading their doctrine in Germany and Austria .

Antony Sutton, WALL STREET AND THE BOLSHEVIK REVOLUTION, p. 83.

This falls in the interlude period, starting from the time when Lenin seized power up to the time in the summer of 1918 when Allied decision-makers set themselves on armed intervention in Russia against the Bolsheviks. Just as Sutton had downplayed the significance of the facts about Trotsky not being a Bolshevik in early 1917 and then later being rejected as a refugee by most governments on the earth, here Sutton downplays the significance of World War I in shaping Allied decisions towards Russia under the Bolsheviks during the interlude period. Michael Occleshaw's DANCES IN DEEP SHADOWS gives a more in-depth treatment of the arguments going on in the background among Allied decision-makers. Sutton devotes several chapters to this interlude period without ever clarifying for his readers the switches and transitions which lead up to the final decision to intervene. This is very much like the way he blurred over the picture of past rivalries between Lenin and Trotsky and simply allowed the reader to conclude that any aid given to Trotsky must have been part of a plan to place the Bolsheviks in power. Much of what Sutton discusses in his book falls within the date range after the Bolshevik victory and up to the time intervention was decided upon. A smaller portion also falls in the range from the summer of 1918 through to 1920 when the civil war was raging, but Sutton doesn't do a very good job of clarifying such changes as they occur.

He does list some cases of goods being sold (not given away, as was the case with Allied aid to the Whites) in this period on page 158, but these are no longer personal contributions free of charge such as Thompson had made in February 1918 and they don't come close to accounting for the White defeat. The most expensive purchase listed by Sutton on this page is for food, 10 million dollars worth on January 22, 1920. He also refers to some purchases of what he lists as "Machinery" without further details, though some of this may very well have had applicability to the war effort of the Reds against the Whites. There's no clear reference to overt military aid, although the clothing sold (not given away as the British ended up handing over to the Whites) could have some applicability towards dressing up soldiers. Nothing here comes close to the tanks and other military aid given free of charge by Britain and other Allied powers to the Whites.

This is where one starts getting into what for some people is a politically delicate question, the issue of just how anti-whatever does someone really need to be in order to not be listed as a follower of whatever. It comes up today in some of the charges made by Daniel Pipes against George Soros, charging Soros with being a supporter of Muslim terrorism. Soros is a businessman. It is not possible to do business on the global scale which Soros does without carrying on exchanges with Arabs or Muslims. Soros does it freely. Nevertheless, it would a gross caricature to try analyzing the main events such as they occur in the Arab and Muslim worlds as a plot hatched by George Soros. All of the questions which anyone may have as to just why were some people willing to consider trading with the Bolsheviks to some degree during the civil war and moreso subsequently can only be answered when one has some familiarity with the details of that war. Unfortunately my experience with most people has been that the more willing they are to draw out an extensive thesis of Wall Street placing the Bolsheviks in power, the less they actually know about the Russian civil war. I can toss out a few details and references here for people with further interest.

Regarding the aid given to the Whites, some of John Hodgson's observations have relevance:

"I did not, during the whole of my service with the Army in Russia , ever see a nurse in a British uniform, but I have seen girls, who were emphatically not nurses, walking the streets of Novorossiisk wearing regulation British hospital skirts and stockings," wrote John Hodgeson, a British war correspondent sent to report about life in Denikin's Russia . "I saw and talked to young ladies of good social standing ... who were wearing costumes made of British officers' serge," he added, as he wrote of men at the front who went into battle "wearing practically nothing but a print shirt and a patched pair of trousers." Almost every minor bureaucrat in South Russia seemed to have a new, crisply creased British summer uniform. "It is impossible to believe," Hodgson reported, "that we sent out clothing for the benefit of lawyers and petty civil officials." ... Transferred to the military sphere, such massive corruption proved destructive. While Denikin's desperate commanders tried to break through Red fortifications with infantry, British tanks sat on the dock at Novorossiisk. Although Hodgson found "it was always possible for a local profiteer to bribe railway officials and obtain freight cars ... on a colossal scale," it proved impossible to find trains or trucks to move the tanks inland. "One night," Hodgson noted sadly, "a typical Black Sea storm caused one of the tanks to slip its moorings, and the whole consignment [of ten] slid quietly to the bottom of the harbor." Nor was that an isolated instance. While men dying from typhus and dysentery lay on rotting, lice-infested sacks, Hodgson watched the equipment for an entire two hundred-bed British hospital disappear at wharfside. "Beds, blankets, sheets, mattresses, and pillows disappeared as if by magic," he reported. "They found their way to the houses of staff officers and members of the Kuban Government." ----- -- W. Bruce Lincoln, RED VICTORY: A HISTORY OF THE RUSSIAN CIVIL WAR, pp. 218-20. That just scratches the surface, but it should be a reminder to someone that the reasons for the White defeat were much more fundamentally basic than simply an alleged Wall Street conspiracy. People who lack familiarity with such facts have no way of assessing just how could it possibly occur to someone in New York to consider eventually trading with the Bolsheviks, apart from attributing it something like a grandiose Illuminati conspiracy. It was an aristocratic social disease which infected the Whites that instead showing gratitude for such aid and seriously attempting to use it they would allow themselves to freely waste it and then curse Lloyd George as an agent of world Jewry when more such aid wasn't coming. They White commanders behaved with much worse arrogance towards their soldiers and populations within the range of their control.

Some indications of the frustrations which the Allied commanders in Russia had are worth tossing out just as illustrative anecdotes:

-----

Georgia was the most powerful of the new countries and caused by far the most trouble to the Volunteer Army. The Menshevik government in 1918 received help from the Germans... Nevertheless in the summer of 1918 it seemed that the two anti-Bolshevik powers might cooperate against the common enemy...

The end of the World War and the arrival of British troops were interpreted by both the Georgians and the Volunteers as favorable developments. The White Russians believed that the British would support the principle of United Russia and resist separatist tendencies.. .

 Denikin, who had always remained fiercely loyal to the Allies, was disappointed to find that the British soon forgave the Georgians for their earlier cooperation with Germany . London 's policy toward the Caucasus was based on the desire to maintain the existing governments, without predetermining the future of Russia , until the Peace Conference. The British rather naively believed that the struggle against Bolshevism would be perceived as so important that all anti-Bolshevik forces would unite for this cause. They made vain efforts to bring together the Georgians and White Russians. As the Turks withdrew from the Caucasus at the end of the World War, the Georgians and the Armenians began to fight one another for the territories just freed... Denikin immediately took advantage of the opportunity and occupied some of the disputed territory. To his intense disappointment, the British guaranteed the status quo... Denikin had no intention of obeying... The episode lowered British prestige. Denikin did not forgive them for taking the side of his enemies, and the Georgians blamed them for allowing the Russians to take the district. Both sides understood that the British wanted to preserve the status quo; however, if that status quo was challenged by force, the British were unwilling or unable to re-establish it. The lesson was that the advice of the foreigners could safely be disregarded. ----- -- Peter Kenez, CIVIL WAR IN SOUTH RUSSIA , 1919-1920: THE DEFEAT OF THE WHITES, pp. 203-4.

Iudenich's own North-Western Army was quite small ... but with guaranteed Estonian and Finnish assistance he could certainly have captured Petrograd ... Kolchak was well aware of this, and in personal letter to Mannerheim of June 23rd 1919, he literally begged the Finnish leader... Mannerheim was certain that his army would fight for the Russian Whites... the army would certainly follow him in an attack on the Russian Bolsheviks.. . However, Mannerheim continued, neither the Finnish government nor army would be willing 'unless we receive a guarantee that the New Russia for which we are fighting agrees to certain conditions.. .' For several months Kolchak had been receiving advice from almost every quarter that he should grant Mannerheim any guarantees he might request, so vital was the capture of Petrograd the anti-Bolshevik cause...

The admiral's prime objection to the prospective Iudenich-Mannerheim agreement was that it entailed the 'unconditional recognition of Finnish independence' ...

By the autumn of 1919, however, Kolchak's hostile attitude was but one of several factors undermining White Russian-Finnish relations. During the summer Mannerheim's legacy had been superseded by a republic and a less interventionist Diet...

Jonathan Smele, CIVIL WAR IN SIBERIA : THE ANTI-BOLSHEVIK GOVERNMENT OF ADMIRAL KOLCHAK, 1918-1920, pp. 303-5.

French commanders had been assured that they were to seek the assistance of and support of all elements who might be engaged in the struggle against the Bolsheviks. This means that they were prepared to deal with both the Volunteers and their political rivals, hoping to encourage the development of a unified front. Much to their disgust, the local factions refused to set aside their political differences for a common cause... The Volunteers showed little interest in fighting the Bolsheviks, the French complained. "They play, drink and amuse themselves as in the past." Furthermore, the arrogant behavior of the Volunteers had heightened their alienation from the people and exacerbated old class hatreds. Colonel Henry Freydenberg, who was d'Anselme's chief of staff, noted that the Volunteer Army was 90 percent officers and had absolutely no ties with the people. The Ukrainian peasantry identified them with the old order, and, as a result, "Between the volunteers and the people," d'Anselme reported, "there is truly a savage hatred." ... the French army looked to support from the local population and expected that the Volunteers would provide this link. When it became obvious that not only were the Volunteers incapable of providing a bridge to the local population but also were in fact an obstacle to any support or even sympathy from the Ukrainian population, the French command concluded that the situation could not be saved. Officers throughout the hierarchy of command came to believe that the intervention was on behalf of a lost cause and certainly would not succeed until the base of support for the Volunteers was broadened, but among the people of the Ukraine and among other potential elements opposed to the Bolsheviks. ----- -- Kim Munholland, "The French Army and Intervention in the Ukraine ," Peter Pastor (ed.), Revolutions and Intervention in Hungary and its Neighbor States , Volume XX of War and Society in East Central Europe , pp. 347-8.

----- One of the sternest critics of this 'mad rush' was General Knox of Britmis [Britmis = British Military Mission to Siberia ]. Again and again he protested to Kolchak and to Lebedev that it was utterly pointless, if not downright dangerous, to call men to arms whom he ... well knew that the government could neither clothe nor equip, let alone feed for any length of time... However, completely under the spell of Lebedev (who dismissed the Briton's criticisms as 'trifles'), Kolchak chose to ignore Knox and, over the winter of 1918 to 1919, untrained and unreliable peasant conscripts continued to be rushed to the Urals front as fast as Siberia's railways could carry them. Once there, they would be left to fend for themselves in the daily scavenge for food and shelter -- a demoralizing process which, as Sukin noted, not only led to resentment from the local peasantry (from whom the abandoned troops requisitioned 'everything that came to hand') but also bred disrespect for the central authorities among the ranks and the lower levels of command and contributed to the development of an independent, 'partisan' spirit in the army. Knox also attempted to convince Kolchak that an army is only ever as strong as its reserve. As of the date of the commencement of the Russian Army's spring offensive, however, it had no reserve: every available man had been sent to the front or was in the process of being sent there. In February, at a conference at the stavka, Knox had at last prevailed upon the Russians to muster the necessary troops for the establishment and training of five reserve divisions in the rear ... four of which would be outfitted by Britmis with the equipment arriving from the British Army. But, due to the otiose pace at which the Omsk military establishment preferred to work -- the Minister of War, Stepanov, had 'a congenial reluctance to decide anything', according to Knox -- the necessary orders were not even issued until the March 18th; and it was not until May (after Knox had fired off a couple of missives to the lethargic Minister of War and to Kolchak) that the conscripts for the reserve divisions actually began to be levied. Thus if the unthinkable should happen and Kolchak's great offensive of March did not occasion the immediate demise of the Bolsheviks but signalled instead only the beginning of a lengthy campaign -- and worse still if the Red Army should counter-attack and manage to break through into Siberia -- Kolchak would have no means of replenishing the Russian Army, for the new reserve could not possibly have been ready to step into the line before the summer of 1919. ----- -- Jonathan Smele, CIVIL WAR IN SIBERIA : THE ANTI-BOLSHEVIK GOVERNMENT OF ADMIRAL KOLCHAK, 1918-1920, pp. 228-9.

Kolchak's decisions in this case are typical of how the lack of any serious political or economic program for the country tended to exert a pressure on the Whites for prompt military action without waiting to build up and equip reserves which would be capable of sustaining a long war. If the Reds had ever been offered such aid by anyone such as Knox was giving to Kolchak they would have used it much more intelligently. But that's only because they had much greater sense of political confidence that they "knew" what the world of the future they were fighting for was. The Whites did not have any such schemata for defining their goals and therefore simply assumed that the war would be won quickly and they would figure what should come after that.

These are just some tentative examples tossed out very quickly. But hopefully they give some idea why one should be cautious of attaching too much significance to Sutton's claims without first filling in the dirty details of the Russian civil war. All of this is missing from Sutton's book and someone who hasn't taken time to study it separately won't be tipped off to such by Sutton.

Actually for starting background to the civil war, it's probably better to begin with Lars Lih, BREAD AND AUTHORITY IN RUSSIA, 1914-1921. Lih's study is not strictly speaking about the civil war, it's about the food crisis and consequent famine which began in Czarist Russia when war began and resulted from the inefficiencies in the Czarist distributional system. Without that breakdown of food distribution there would probably have been no revolution, at least not at this time yet. Lih's study provides a much better framework for grasping the geography of the civil war.

The food-supply crisis played an unappreciated role in the Bolshevik success in overcoming active resistance during the civil war since the wavering front between the White armies and the Red Army tended to follow the division between grain surplus and deficit regions. After listing the twenty-one deficit provinces and the twenty-four surplus provinces, Arskii pointed out that all of the deficit provinces were under permanent Bolshevik control, but only five surplus provinces. Portugeis argued that "this 'war' was no more than a punitive food-supply expedition on the part of the hungry and a food-supply boycott on the part of those with food."

This split in the peasantry, already evident in 1917, did not give equal strength to all contenders. Whereas the peasants in the White armies were protecting their grain, the peasants in the Red Army were either net grain consumers themselves or were producers under intolerable pressure unless and until the outlying regions were conquered. When the White armies went on the offensive, they often made rapid gains, striking deep into Bolshevik territory, but then they would collapse and even more rapidly retreat. One reason for this pattern was that the White generals were moving from grain-rich regions to grain-poor regions. The peasants in the White armies could therefore only lose from reunification of the country.

Lars Lih, BREAD AND AUTHORITY IN RUSSIA , 1914-1921, p. 253.

The White leadership gained power relatively easily in the agriculturally better off regions, but they had no political experience which could enable to devise a winning strategy for civil war against the Bolsheviks. The major White bastions were in south Russia and Siberia . A classic 2-volume study by Peter Kenez, THE CIVIL WAR IN SOUTH RUSSIA, where volume 1 is subtitled "1918" and volume two "1919-1920," gives a good covering of the war on that front. The Siberian front is laid in great depth in Jonathan Smele's CIVIL WAR IN SIBERIA: THE ANTI-BOLSHEVIK GOVERNMENT OF ADMIRAL KOLCHAK. Apart from the Red-White conflict the civil war also carried a strong element of urban-rural conflict represented by the Greens.

The Greens world outlook was an interesting blending of Bakuninism and Pol Potism. They had an ideological hostility towards cities which would suggest something like the Khmer Rouge evacuating the full urban population of Phnom Penh and surrounding areas to the countryside. But the Greens were too anarchistic to be able to effectively organize an army and government which could win a civil war and consolidate the victory. It was a given fact that only the Whites had the apparatus needed to win and war and consolidate victory. The Greens played an important role in defeating the Whites, but they never stood a chance of winning the civil war themselves.

They called themselves Greens because this was the color of the agriculturalists and it denoted opposition to both sides in the war... The first attempt to organize a movement took place in August 1919, when partisan representatives held a secret meeting in the village of Vorontsovka ... The movement grew quickly in the fall of 1919. In November the executive committee called a meeting in the Georgian coastal town of Gagry ... The conference adopted a platform which expressed hostility to toward both Reds and Whites. The delegates denounced not only the Communists but also cities in general as exploitative. In their plan for the revolution, the proletariat had no place. Not only the peasants' ideology but their strategy was utopian... Voronovich immediately started to organize a military force... However, the enthusiasm of his new recruits carried him away. What happened then cannot be described in purely military terms: in a matter of days, Denikin's shaky chain of authority collapsed and the Greens were completely victorious. The demoralized White troops left the district in such a hurry that they did not even carry their weapons with them. Many switched sides and joined the rebels. For the first time the Green movement acquired a large store of arms... The attitude of the British was crucially important for the survival of the peasant regime... The British, who wanted to arrest the disintegration of the anti-Bolshevik movement, wished to make every effort to achieve peace between Denikin and the Greens. Keyes persuaded Voronovich to travel with him to Novorossisk in order to talk with the White leaders. This effort proved to be a complete fiasco... The British made one more attempt to mediate between the Whites and the Greens... Since the Green Army at the time was on the verge of capturing Tuapse, the peasant leaders saw no need to negotiate and turned down the British offer. The demise of the Greens was not caused by the strength of their enemies, but by internal disintegration. .. The peasants could harm their enemies, but could not establish a government capable of defending their interests... The peasants achieved quick victories because the Whites had been unable to establish a functioning administration in the villages, but then they too lost power for the same reason: they, too, had no remedy for disorganization. Of course the sources of White and Green administrative failures were different: the Whites failed to penetrate the villages; the Greens did have grassroots support, but they had neither the personnel nor the ideology necessary for for administering the territory under their rule. ----- -- Peter Kenez, CIVIL WAR IN SOUTH RUSSIA , 1919-1920, pp. 239-43.

Sutton draws up a false idealization of the Greens in a blurb at the book's opening:

"TO those unknown Russian libertarians, also known as the Greens, who in 1919 fought both the Reds and the Whites in their attempt to gain a free and voluntary Russia ."

Sutton is simply drawing up a rosy image of the hodge-podge of forces which made up the Greens as an ideological cover. He probably understands that there is no point is trying to pose the Whites as any kind of popular alternative to the Reds. Every account makes uniformly clear that the Russian population rejected the Whites as the first step before anything else. So instead Sutton settles on the Greens and provides the label "unknown Russian libertarians" to make the picture flow more easily in with American conservative ideology. Just what exactly were the Greens? Two items of specific interest on this point are Oliver Radkey, THE UNKNOWN CIVIL WAR IN SOVIET RUSSIA, and Michael Vickery, CAMBODIA 1975-1982. Vickery relates some of Radkey's findings to Cambodia for comparison and contrast: ----- Radkey also speculated on what the Russian Revolution would have been if the SRP [SRP = Social Revolutionary Party], instead of the Bolsheviks, had won with the support of the "Green bands and their leaders." The latter, he believed, would not have dissolved and, against the bourgeois nationalism of the urban SRP leaders, would have, for one thing, "insisted that only officers from the depths of the people and of proven dedication to its cause could be entrusted with the creation of the new Russian army" -- in contrast to a policy of rebuilding the army with reorganized officers of the old army as the SRP proposed, and as even the Bolsheviks were willing to consider. What that might have led to can be seen from the action of Antonov, the Tambov "Green" leader, who decided that all officers from the old army were as such unreliable and had all those who had joined him against the Bolsheviks killed. Thus Russia ,under the SRP and a "Green" peasant army, might well have experienced, like post-1975 Cambodia , massacres far worse than anything which occurred under the Bolsheviks. Moreover, Radkey emphasized in gruesome detail the atrocities that were regularly perpetrated by the peasant rebels. Precisely as depicted in the Cambodian STV [STV = Standard Total View], but here apparently without need of revision, "they were capable of actions that explored the ultimate recesses of all that is fiendish in human nature." They killed en masse, sometimes "even the young and the aged," and "an assortment of tortures, crude and refined, accompanied these killings." Even peasant children were encouraged by their elders to become torturers and executioners. Vickery , CAMBODIA 1975-1982, pp. 302-3. A major difference in Cambodia was that there was an organized party which had originally followed a policy of simply aiding the Vietnamese with the expectation that if Vietnam began developing its economy after US withdrawal then it would be possible for Cambodia to develop off of that. There was no industrial proletariat in Cambodia and so the leadership of the Cambodian Communist Party refused to try to make a revolution without one. When the US began bombing Cambodia in 1969 that set off a political upheaval in the Cambodian CP and the new faction which gained control in 1972-3 under Pol Pot turned more towards the idea of the type of anti-urban peasant revolution against the cities which the Russian Greens often expressed a wish for. But in the case of the latter, they never had any organized apparatus for carrying off a revolution and that's probably the best thing which can be said about them.

Sutton's miscomprehension of the Greens is probably linked with the way that Cold War mentalities have taught people to remember something called "the Red Terror" but any interest in "White Terror" or "Green Terror" is weak at best. The most that some may suggest is that pogroms were carried out against Jews (which is correct) but that otherwise terror carried back and forth by all parties is not part of the picture. In reality the Reds were on average the more moderate in this respect. This does not negate the realities of prisoners tortured under horrendous conditions by the Cheka, but something like Antonov's policy of executing officers from the Czarist army who joined him would not have been done. It was a deliberate policy of the Reds to try to incorporate former Czarist officers into the Red Army, in quite a few cases by holding the officer's family hostage in case he refused to join, but not to carry out executions blindly because someone had once belonged to the Czarist army. Many charges were made against Trotsky in the 1930s relating to the degree to which he had accepted people like Tukhachevsky from the old army, but that problem would not even have arisen if Antonov had decided things.

The earliest act of real terror in the civil war that I've come across was committed by the Whites in early 1918:

However, the Volunteer Army's hope of holding up the front was shattered by the Taganrog workers' uprising on January 27. Since production in the factories had stopped and wages had not been paid, the atmosphere among the workers was explosive. When a White soldier killed a worker of the Baltic factory, a Bolshevik stronghold for months, the funeral became a political demonstration in which 50,000 workers participated. The Volunteer Army authorities wanted to prevent the demonstration, but they lacked the strength. The fighting which began in the city was unlike anything that had occurred since the beginning of the Revolution. The workers and soldiers were not reluctant to shoot at each other. The ferocity of the fighting was the first indication of the nature of the Civil War, which was getting under way. Here there was no question of negotiations. When twelve armed workers ran out of ammunition and were captured, the junkers put out their eyes, cut off their noses, and buried them alive with dead dogs. The other side did not lag behind in savagery. White soldiers who were surrounded in a wine cellar were burned alive. No one was allowed to escape.

-- Peter Kenez, CIVIL WAR IN SOUTH RUSSIA , 1918, p. 92.

It should be noted that this occurred at a time when it's generally agreed that the Cheka had not yet taken on a practice of terror. Boris Levytsky, THE USES OF TERROR: THE SOVIET SECRET POLICE, 1917-1970, despite being very critical of Lenin and the Bolsheviks as a whole, makes it clear that the Cheka was not in the beginning set up as an institute of terror and only took on the role as the civil war and disorders grew. It's a fallacy both to view White terror as a reaction to Red terror, or to imagine that White terror only pertained to anti-Jewish pogroms.

The first battles showed all too vividly the type of fighting that would dominate Russia 's Civil War, for terror coldly and brutally applied became a part of the struggle of Red against White from the very beginning... Their followers either passionately drawn to the Bolsheviks' credo of class struggle or morally repelled by it, Kornilov and Lenin therefore both sanctioned terror more readily than commanders in Europe's Great War ever had. "The greater the terror, the greater our victories," Kornilov told his men as Antonov[-Ovseenko] 's Red Guards began their march. "We must save Russia ," he added later, "even if we have to set fire to half of it and shed the blood of three-fourths of all Russians." The Bolsheviks spoke in similar absolute terms. Trotsky demanded that measures be taken to "wipe off the face of the earth the counterrevolution of the Cossack generals and the Kadet bourgeoisie. .."

W. Bruce Lincoln, RED VICTORY: A HISTORY OF THE RUSSIAN CIVIL WAR, pp. 85-6.

There's nothing specifically about Jews in this statement by Kornilov, "three-fourths of all Russians" would include a great many Gentiles. But people seem better at remembering Zinoviev's alleged comment about exterminating "ten million," a much smaller population fraction than Kornilov's "three-fourths of all Russians."

If we distinguish the Social Revolutionaries overall from the Greens (with whom they sometimes intersected) then the major political rivals of the Bolsheviks were the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries. These groups would have been politically capable of managing a government counter-posed to the Bolsheviks. But they had no organizational apparatus capable of performing the tasks which everyone agreed needed to be carried out under the conditions of food-shortage and famine. In the midst of what was occurring throughout Russia , these groups ended up breaking into pieces and attaching themselves either to the Whites or the Reds. Had the Mensheviks or SRs been organizationally capable of exerting their authority over the White leadership then the civil war might have had a different end. But with the White leadership in control defeat was guaranteed at the political level a priori. It might be worth noting that the Mensheviks who took the side of opposite to the Bolsheviks included a fair number of Jews. The White forces would have been better off if such people had been in control instead.

Although I can recall one person once allegedly quoting Benjamin Ginsburg (I think that's who it was) to the effect that Jewish alienation from Russian society was behind Bolshevik methodologies, the reality is that no political faction was more fully alienated from the Russian populace than the multitude of White leadership factions. Anyone who tells you differently is most likely blinded by decades of Cold War mythology. The defeat of the Whites can only be understood in terms of their total political failure in Russia . Attempting to set up an inflated image of a grandiose Wall Street conspiracy actually aiming specifically at placing the Bolsheviks in power leaves too much open to incomprehensibility . One simply can't account for the overtly clear preference showed by all the Allied powers towards aiding the Whites against the Reds at the onset of the war when it seemed as if this might be a constructive option, and the significant volumes of aid simply boondoggled away to no purpose by the Whites as the Allies were trying to aid them, within such a simplistic framework. This kind of general background is essential to make any assessment of what Sutton does or does not establish. The charges made by Sutton, when put in context, come back to something more absurd than Daniel Pipes' accusations against George Soros. We simply are asserting that people on Wall Street were not specifically anti-Bolshevik enough to the point to earn an ideological award from the political Right-wing for it, but not that Wall Street engineered the Bolshevik victory. That much is quite believable.

On a related note, it's worth pointing out that in Germany we have a much clearer association between Jews and counter-revolution. The German Social Democratic Party had established a legally recognized political base for itself within Germany before the war. The waves of mutinies which broke out in the very last part of the war were not engineered by them but were too sporadically anarchistic to fit with anything that Lenin would have directed had he had the option. Social Democrats like Ebert played a principal role in sustaining the government's public credibility while these disturbances were suppressed. Luxemburg went out into the open in the streets with those workers and soldiers carrying on the uprising, but she did not begin it, lead it, or even recommend it. Her view was that it was a premature as a revolution, but that she had a duty to be with the mutinous working class as they learned through experience. Lenin would have recognized that there was no organized preparation for carrying out a revolution and rushed into hiding undercover. Luxemburg stayed in the open and was executed by a government staffed with a fair set of Jewish Social Democrats.

Regarding the words of Shamir that Anthony Sutton and Duglas Reed saw that Jews benefited, and they hated Communism; so they concluded that Jews made Communism.

It's worth distinguishing a bit more here, since there are two distinct questions involved.

Sutton does not claim that "Jews made Communism." He even has an appendix entitled "THE JEWISH-CONSPIRACY THEORY OF THE BOLSHEVIK REVOLUTION" where he argues that this theory is false. His conclusion carries the statement that "It is significant that Jacob Schiff, often cited as a source of funds for the Bolshevik Revolution, was in fact against support of the Bolshevik regime" (p. 189). The document which he is dated November 25, 1918, and should be placed in the context of what I'd mentioned previously about the disputes going on in Allied circles over how to react the Bolshevik revolution while the First World War continued. Some were in favor of aiding the Bolsheviks in spreading revolutionary propaganda into Germany others were not. Schiff apparently belongs to the second group.

Sutton's principal claim is not that "Jews made Communism" but that the Bolshevik revolution can and should be centrally understood as the result of an operation carried out by non-Russian foreigners with a long-time residence on Wall Street, whatever the genealogy. On this matter, Sutton's book shows far too little comprehension of the real facts about the breakdown of the Czarist food distribution system, the social and political crisis it created, the ways that different groups responded to this crisis in the context of the civil war, the reasons why a Bolshevik victory in the civil war was the most logical outcome, and the futility of Allied attempt to intervene on behalf of Bolshevik opponents. Sutton's basic thesis is very faulty in all of these respects, but he does not adopt the "Jews made Communism" view.

Strictly speaking you could adopt the "Jews made Communism" view while nevertheless accepting that the civil war was won by the Bolsheviks because of purely native factors on the ground in Russia, or you could assert (as Sutton does) that the revolution was a Wall Street creation masterminded by non-Jews. The two issues are separate, although often combined.