Holocaust and Holodomor (Origins of
Anti Semitism)
December 29, 2006
by Nicholas Lyssson
1. ROLE OF JEWS IN UKRAINIAN FAMINE

Duranty’s 10-million number may have come from Stalin himself. It’s reputedly the same number Stalin gave Winston Churchill a decade later; see, e.g., Eric Margolis, “Remembering Ukraine’s
Unknown Holocaust,” Toronto Sun, Dec. 13, 1998 (available online).
According to Arthur Koestler, The Ghost in the Machine, pp. 261-62 (1967):
In 1932-3, the years of the great famine which followed the forced collectivisation of the land, I travelled widely in the Soviet Union, writing a book which was never published. I saw entire villages
deserted, railway stations blocked by crowds of begging families, and the proverbial starving infants. .. . [T]hey were quite real, with stick-like arms, puffed up bellies and cadaverous heads. I reacted to the brutal impact of reality on illusion in a manner typical of the true believer. I was surprised and bewildered—but the elastic shock-absorbers of my [Communist] Party training began to operate at once.

I had eyes to see, and a mind conditioned to explain away what they saw. This “inner censor” is more reliable and effective than any official censorship. . . .Some Ukrainian accounts, and that of Muggeridge, who covered the holodomor for the Manchester Guardian, take the trouble to say that this mass starvation was imposed largely by Jews.

Lazar M. Kaganovich is often identified as an architect of the policy. A photograph in Montefiore, Red Tsar, above, shows him personally searching a farm for concealed food. In Muggeridge’s novel Winter in Moscow (1934) he appears as Kokoshkin, “a Jew” and “Stalin’s chief lieutenant.”

In 2003 Levko Lukyanenko, the first Ukrainian ambassador to Canada, was said to have made an anti-emitic embarrassment of himself on this subject. But see Orest Subtelny, Ukraine: A History, p. 363
(2d ed. 1994)(“Jews were . . . disproportionately prominent among the Bolsheviks, notably in their leadership, among their tax- and grain-gathering officials, and especially in the despised and feared. . .
secret police [emphasis added]”); Montefiore, Red Tsar, above, p. 305 (as late as 1937, Jews accounted for only 5.7 percent of Soviet party members, but “formed a majority in the government” [emphasis added]); Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century, p. 254 (Princeton University Press, 2004)(the secret police was “one of the most Jewish of all Soviet institutions”); and Arno J. Mayer, Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?, p. 60 (1988)(“As of the late twenties . . a]disproportionate number of Jews came to hold high posts in the secret police and to serve as political commissars in the armed services.

They. . . were. . . appointed to high-level and conspicuous positions which called for unimpeach-able political loyalty. . . ”). Mayer, a professor emeritus of history at Princeton, is himself Jewish, and had to flee the Nazis as a refugee.

The Israeli writer Boas Evron says the leaders of the Soviet revolution were scarcely less Jewish than the Zionists. See his book Jewish State or Israeli Nation?, p. 107 (English tr., Indiana University Press, 1995): “The backgrounds of the two groups were much the same. . . Only differences of chance and temperament caused the one [individual] to be a Zionist and the other a revolutionary
socialist.”

On February 8, 1920, Winston Churchill published an article, “Zionism Versus Bolshevism: A Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People,” in the Illustrated Sunday Herald (London), reprinted in Lenni Brenner, ed., 51 Documents: Zionist Collaboration with the Nazis, p. 23 (2002). Among other things,Churchill said (pp. 25-26):
There is no need to exaggerate the part played in the creation of Bolshe-vism. . . by. . . international and for the most part atheistical Jews. . . . [I]t probably outweighs all others. With the notable exception of Lenin [who had a Jewish grandfather and by some accounts a Jewish wife], the majority of leading figures are Jews. Moreover, the principal inspiration and driving power comes from the Jewish leaders. . . . And the prominent, if not indeed the principal, part in the system of terrorism. . .has been taken by Jews. . . . The same evil prominence was obtained by Jews in the brief period of terror during which Bela Kun ruled in Hungary. The same phenomenon has been presented in Germany (especially in Bavaria), so far as this madness has been allowed to prey on the temporary prostration of the German people.

Churchill’s views, as expressed here, resemble those of the Times of London’s correspondent in Russia, Robert Wilton. See George Gustav Telberg and Robert Wilton, The Last Days of the Romanovs (1920), esp. pp. 222-30, 391 (“[t]aken according to numbers of population, the Jews
represented one in ten; among the komisars that rule Bolshevik Russia they are nine in ten—if anything, the proportion of Jews is still higher”), 392-93 and 400. The French version of the book, Les Derniers Jours des Romanofs, also published in 1920, contains a list of 556 top figures in the Bolshevik regime, classified by ethnicity. The Jewish proportion is a bit over eight in ten, including two-thirds of the leadership of the secret police.

The non-Jews are divided among various small categories—Russian, Lett, Armenian, German, Georgian, etc. The list is absent from the slightly later English and American editions, but is available online. See also John F. O’Conor, The Sokolov Investigation (1971)(a translation, with commentary, of sections of Nikolai Sokolov’s Enquête judiciaire sur l'assassinat de la famille impériale Russe),
especially for the comments of O’Conor and his sources on Wilton.[i]
Jews among the Bolsheviks who imposed the holodomor of 1932-33 would have relished settling scores after the 40 years of bloody pogroms that followed Czar Alexander II’s assassination in 1881— especially the still-recent massacre of 50,000 to 100,000 Jews, mostly in the Ukraine, during the Russian civil war of 1918-21. (Far greater numbers of gentiles, of course, also perished in that war; estimates run well into the millions.)