The 2007 Romanian movie The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, which won more than twenty international prizes, depicts the Semashko-style health care system through the heartbreaking true story of Constantin Nica, a retired Romanian engineer who had the misfortune of growing old in a country that still ran a nightmarish government health care system twenty years after its last Communist dictator was gunned down by his own people.
The fictional Mr. Lazarescu, gravely ill, is followed as a Romanian government ambulance shuttles him from one government-owned hospital to the next. At the first three hospitals, although the doctors determine that he does need urgent surgery, the bureaucracy refuses to take him in because he is too old and does not have enough money to bribe the hospital personnel. Mr. Lazarescu stubbornly refuses to give up, but at the fourth hospital, he dies after a delayed and botched surgery. (The real Mr. Nica was actually dumped onto a park bench and left there to die.) Mr. Lazarescu’s real enemy was not his illness but the uncaring, authoritarian attitude so deeply ingrained in bureaucratic practice. The whole movie is so realistic that even The New York Times—a strong supporter of government-run health care—had to admit that the movie “absorbs you into its world.”
The Death of Mr. Lazarescu might be required viewing for our contemporary candidates for public office as they ponder U.S. government health care for all. Romania’s example may give them at least some food for thought.
Ronald Reagan once said that freedom is never more than one generation from extinction. Russia proved him right. Toward the end of his life, the ailing Lenin dictated a political “testament” dated December 25, 1922, in which he began by worrying that Stalin, “having become Secretary-General, has unlimited authority concentrated in his hands, and I am not sure whether he will always be capable of using that authority with sufficient caution.”
In a postscript dated January 4, 1923, Lenin described Stalin as being “too crude” and called for him to be replaced as the leader of the Bolshevik Party by another communist who would be “more tolerant, more loyal, more polite and more considerate to the comrades, less capricious, etc.”7 A few months later, Lenin chose Leon Trotsky, at that time the war commissar, as the leader of the Bolshevik Party and his own successor. In self-defense, Stalin thereupon formed a coalition with Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the father of Russia’s socialist secret police, which had successfully protected Lenin’s dictatorship by arbitrarily executing a reported quarter of a million real and imagined enemies. Drawn up by Felix Dzerzhinsky himself, a dezinformatsiya ploy put the baton of succession firmly in Stalin’s hands. In January 1924, when Lenin died, Trotsky happened to be away in the Crimea taking the cure. Dzerzhinsky made sure that he was misinformed about the date of the funeral. With his only rival far from Moscow, Stalin easily managed to place the crown on his own head. A few months later, he rewarded Dzerzhinsky’s loyalty by making him a candidate member of the Politburo.
Over the years, Stalin made Dzerzhinsky an object of Communist veneration second only to Lenin, though he buried that cult deep in secrecy, as he did with all the really important things in the Soviet Union. Lenin was embalmed and put on display in Red Square. After Dzerzhinsky’s death in 1926, a figure representing him—using death impressions of his face and hands and dressed in a Cheka uniform—was placed in a glass coffin and exhibited at the officers’ club of what would later be called the KGB, now the FSB.8 Then, in December 1937, on the twentieth anniversary of the Cheka’s founding, Stalin raised Dzerzhinsky to the rank of “knight of the revolution.”
Stalin is long gone, but killings by political police are still alive. In all Eastern European countries “liberated” by Stalin’s Red Army, the way to Soviet-style socialism was paved with killings. On February 2, 1945, for instance, the NKVD—which had openly taken over the whole Bulgarian military, police, and economy—executed three regents, twenty-two ministers, sixty-eight members of parliament, and eight advisors to King Boris after accusing them of being Nazi war criminals. In the following months, another 2,680 members of Bulgaria’s “fascist” government were executed as war criminals, and 6,870 were imprisoned despite the fact that Bulgaria had never been at war with the Soviet Union and most of those leaders had been instrumental in eventually moving Bulgaria over to the Allies’ side. These trials were so outrageous that in February 1950, Washington broke off diplomatic relations with Sofia.
In August 1998, Russian General Albert Makashov charged that American-paid Jewish Zionists were ruining the motherland. He called for the “extermination of all Jews in Russia,” shouting in the Duma: “I will round up all the Yids [pejorative for Jews] and send them to the next world.” Russian television replayed this clip over and over again, and on November 4, 1998, the Duma endorsed Makashov’s pogrom. It voted (121 to 107) to defeat a parliamentary motion to censure his hateful statement. Eighty-three of the Communist Party’s 132 members in the Duma voted for Makashov, and of the remainder all but one declined to vote. Just before this vote, a former Soviet spy chief, General Yevgeny Primakov, had become Russia’s prime minister. At the November 7, 1998, demonstration marking the eighty-first anniversary of the October Revolution, crowds of former KGB officers showed their support for the anti-Semitic general, chanting “Hands off Makashov!” and waving signs with anti-Semitic slogans.9
When the KGB archives are finally opened in full, we will find that Soviet socialism was deeply anti-Semitic and killed many more Jews than Nazi Germany did. Totalitarianism always requires a tangible enemy. The Jews, who for centuries were not protected by the power of a nation-state, have always served as a convenient scapegoat for both Nazism and communism.
Nowadays, the general perception is that Nazi Germany was the cradle of anti-Semitism, and it is not easy to change that perception. Nevertheless, before the words “Nazi Holocaust” were on everyone’s tongue, we had the Russian word “pogrom,” which means massacre. To the ancient Greeks, a holocaust was simply a burnt sacrifice. Long before the 1930s, when the German Nazis invented the Jewish Holocaust, the Russian tsars conducted Jewish pogroms. Russia’s first major pogrom against Jews took place on April 15, 1881, in the Ukrainian town of Yelisavetgrad, named for Empress Elizabeth. Russia’s administration and army were experiencing grave disorders and gross corruption, and emissaries from St. Petersburg called for the people’s wrath to be vented on the Jews. The impoverished peasants obliged.
The 1939 edition of an authoritative Russian dictionary defines pogrom: the government-organized mass slaughter of some element of the population as a group, such as the Jewish pogroms in tsarist Russia. Let us go back to the beginning. After 1492, when some of the Jews expelled from Spain by Queen Isabella began settling in Russia, they became involved in tax collection and the administration of large estates where peasants worked. Those were two of the few occupations Jews were allowed to pursue in tsarist Russia. Naturally, the new Jewish immigrants hardly made themselves loved in their new country.
In 1881, Tsar Alexander II was assassinated by a band of Nihilists. Alexander III, his successor, decided to save Russia from anarchy by transforming it into a nation containing only one nationality, one language, one religion, and one form of administration, and he began his new policy by instigating more Yelisavetgrad-style pogroms. A wave of killings, rapes, and the pillaging of Jews spread quickly to hundreds of other towns, reached Warsaw, and moved on to the rest of the Russian empire. The tsarist authorities held the victims responsible for the violence.
In an 1881 memorandum to Tsar Alexander III, the minister of interior, Count Nikolay Ignatyev, blamed the pogroms on “the Jews’ injurious activities” directed against the peasantry. A tsarist investigative commission concluded: “The passion for acquisition and money-grabbing is inherent in the Jew from the day of his birth; it is characteristic of the Semitic race, manifest from almost the first page of the Bible.”10
These anti-Semitic ideas were soon embodied in a document entitled The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, forged by Tsar Alexander III’s newly
created political police, the Okhrana.11 To disguise its hand, the Okhrana claimed it to be the minutes of the first Zionist Congress (held in Basel, Switzerland in 1897), at which the Jews had allegedly plotted to take over the world.
The legendary head of the KGB dezinformatsiya department, General Ivan Agayants, introduced General Pacepa to the secrets of this unique forgery. The Protocols was originally compiled by the Okhrana to smear Russia’s Jews who wanted to modernize the country and to limit the influence of its old aristocracy. The author of the Protocols was an Okhrana disinformation expert, Petr Ivanovich Rachovsky. Then assigned to France, he saw that the Dreyfus affair had divided France into two irreconcilable factions and aroused an enormous wave of anti-Semitism.12 Rachovsky lifted most of his text from an obscure 1864 French satire called Dialogue aux Enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu (Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu) by Maurice Joly, which accused Emperor Napoleon III of plotting to seize all the powers in French society. Rachovsky then merely substituted the words “the world” for France and “the Jews” for Napoleon III.
On October 20, 1894, Alexander III unexpectedly died of nephritis. This caused the Okhrana to sit on the Protocols until 1903, at which time it published them to bolster the weak tsar Nicholas II’s hand against Jewish liberals who favored modernization in Russia. After the Russian Revolution of 1905, a constitution was promulgated and a Duma created. Count Sergey Witte, a former Okhrana target, became prime minister. The Okhrana then used the Protocols to undermine him, publishing it in Paris under the name of a mystic Russian priest, Sergius Nilus, as part of an anti-revolutionary propaganda campaign.
General Sakharovsky showed Pacepa a copy of the Nilus edition from the tsar’s library. According to him, the Protocols had been the most resilient piece of disinformation in history. In 1921, the Times of London published a devastating exposure of the forgery by printing extracts from the Protocols side-by-side with plagiarized passages from the Joly book.13 But that didn’t stop the Protocols from becoming the basis for much of Hitler’s anti-Semitic philosophy, as expressed in Mein Kampf, written in 1923. In fact, Nazi Germany translated the Protocols into many languages and flooded the world with it in support of its allegation that there was a Jewish conspiracy aimed at world domination and that the persecution of Jews was a necessary tool of self-defense for Germany.
Now the Protocols has attained new prominence in the Arab and Islamic world.
CHAPTER 3
SOCIALIST ANTI-SEMITISM
Stalin, who succeeded Lenin to the Kremlin in 1922, hailed from the remote land of Georgia. The Jews had traditionally been serfs in Georgia until 1871, when serfdom was abolished there. Stalin’s own conventional Georgian anti-Semitism was simply transferred into national policy carried out by his political police. When Stalin decided to eliminate his main rival, Leon Trotsky (né Lev Davidovich Bronstein), his political police were told to put together a dezinformatsiya operation portraying Trotsky as a Jewish spy paid by American Zionism. He then expelled Trotsky from the country. That allegation also served as justification for Stalin to have Trotsky barbarically assassinated with an ice pick in Mexico City, without even causing most of Russia to blink.
Next, Stalin sentenced to death the first chairman of the Comintern, Grigory Zinoviev (né Ovsel Gershon Aronov Radomyslsky). He too had been born into a bourgeois Jewish family. Zinoviev was falsely accused of organizing a Terrorist Center for the Assassination of Soviet Government and the CPSU [Communist Party of the Soviet Union] and shot.
The man named by Lenin in his testament as the most capable of the younger generation, Georgy Pyatakov, was framed as a spy in the pay of an invented American Zionist conspiracy. He too was shot. Out of the seven members of Lenin’s Politburo at the time of the October Revolution, only Stalin was still alive when the massacre stopped. Even the wife of Vyacheslav Molotov, Stalin’s strongest political supporter and his prime minister since 1930, was exiled to Siberia for the sole reason that she was a Jew.
To maintain his position as feared boss over the new party stars starting to shine in Eastern Europe after World War II, Stalin periodically framed a few of them as tools of imperial-Zionist espionage services. He started the process in 1949 by organizing widely publicized show trials against the communist leaders of Hungary, Laszlo Rajk and Gyorgy Palfy. Both were sentenced to death. Three years later, Stalin’s political police organized another show trial in Prague, at which the head of the Communist Party, Rudolf Slansky, and ten other party leaders, most of them Jews, were framed as Zionist spies and hanged. Next he kidnapped Hungary’s Prime Minister Imre Nagy from Budapest and had him hanged as a Jewish spy. Imre Nagy was followed by Lucretiu Patrascanu, one of the founders of Romania’s communist party, who was shot in the back of his head. Stalin asserted that these countries were on the verge of falling into imperial-Zionist clutches, so supposedly to preserve their socialist future, he had most of the Jews in Eastern Europe expelled from their communist parties. All in all, 21 million people are believed to have been killed by the KGB and its Eastern European sisters during Stalin’s anti-Semitic purge, many framed as Zionist spies.1
After this consolidation of power by show trial and murder, Stalin made the Cheka answerable only to himself, just as the Okhrana and its predecessors had been responsible only to the tsar. Stalin then changed the name of Cheka into the GPU (Gosudarstvennoye Politicheskoye Upravleniye, or State Political Directorate). This name change was revealingly descriptive.
A U.S. State Department report released in September 1999 asserts that “Jews continue to encounter societal discrimination” in Russia. The report mentions numerous “major acts of intimidation linked to anti-Semitic groups in Russia,” such as a large bomb exploded at the Marina Roscha Synagogue in Moscow on May 13, 1998, 149 graves desecrated at a Jewish cemetery in Irkutsk in May 1998, the Jewish synagogue in Novosibirsk destroyed by vandals in March 1999, and two bombs exploded simultaneously near the Marina Roscha Synagogue and the Moscow Choral Synagogue during the same year.2
On August 3, 2001, ninety-eight U.S. senators expressed concern about the resurgence of anti-Semitism in the Russian Federation in a letter sent to President Putin.3 In January 2005, in a letter to the country’s prosecutor general, nineteen members of the Duma accused the Jews of being on the payroll of American Zionism and asked that all Jewish organizations in Russia be banned. The letter compared Judaism to Satanism and accused Jews of ritual murders.4 “Anti-Semitism in Russia has reached tremendous proportions,” a 2006 survey stated, according to Abraham Hirschorn, a member of the Israeli cabinet. The 2006 report mentions a recent stabbing rampage against Moscow’s synagogue goers and a Russian petition to outlaw Judaism.5
In June 2001, Vladimir Putin and his KGB officers, who had just taken over the Kremlin, in answer to the Lithuanian government’s request for compensation to cover some of the damage caused by the Soviet occupation, brazenly asserted with a straight face that Lithuania and the other Baltic republics had “voluntarily” joined the Soviet Union in the face of the Nazi threat and that the USSR had sent its troops into the Baltic region only after the leaders there had requested it. This bold lie represented another effort to protect one of the Kremlin’s best kept secrets: how the infamous Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939 epitomized the organic connection between communism and Nazism in partitioning much of Europe between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. Entirely constructed by Stalin’s political police, it constituted one of the most anti-Semitic dezinformatsiya operations carried out by the Kremlin. In 1938, Stalin was afraid that the British and French governments, to avoid war with the powerful German military machine, would quietly encourage Hitler to move eastward against the Soviet Union. To Stalin’s eyes, the passivity with which London and Paris reacted to Hitler’s annexation of Austria in March 1938 supported his fears. However, publicly, in 1935, at the Comintern’s Seventh Congress, Stalin had made the defeat of fascism the Soviet Union’s primary goal, following through by organizing inte
rnational “popular fronts” against fascism. So to turn Nazi Germany into a Soviet ally, Stalin used clandestine diplomacy.
He began the operation by appointing fellow Georgian Lavrentiy Beria as head of the NKVD and tasking him to lure Hitler’s Germany into becoming a Soviet ally. Stalin and Beria began by getting rid of the chief of the INO (Innostranny Otdel, the NKVD’s foreign department), Mikhail Shpigelglas, who was Jewish, by having him poisoned. Next, they replaced Shpigelglas with another trusted fellow Georgian, Vladimir Dekanozov, whom Stalin had made deputy commissar of foreign affairs (i.e., deputy foreign minister) at the same time.
Once that was done, Stalin and Beria began purging the rest of the Jews from the INO and from the Commissariat for Foreign Affairs. In a few months, the five-foot Dekanozov, who as vice premier of Georgia had become known as “the hangman of Baku,” arrested most of the INO’s Jewish officers and framed them as Zionist spies. All were shot. Stalin and Beria then had him do the same in the Commissariat for Foreign Affairs. There, the last man to go was the foreign minister himself, Maksim Litvinov, né Meir Walach.
Stalin and Dekanozov completed their Jewish purge in the summer of 1938. They then let Hitler learn that Moscow was ready to give him oil, grain, cotton, and certain scarce metals such as chromium and manganese in exchange for a bilateral nonaggression treaty with Berlin. All the offered products were vital to Hitler’s expansion plans, and to Stalin’s satisfaction, Hitler apparently took the bait. The secret negotiations between Germany and the Soviet Union started in July 1939 in Berlin. Only Molotov of the Soviet delegation was not an INO officer. The delegation’s permanent head was Dekanozov, who, together with a large staff of INO officers under diplomatic cover, spent the next two months in Berlin. Negotiations concluded on August 23, 1939, in Moscow, where Molotov and the German foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, signed the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact, the secret protocol that partitioned Poland between the two signatories and gave the Soviets a free hand over Estonia, Latvia, Finland, Bessarabia, and Northern Bukovina.
Operation Dragon Page 3