Antisemitism: Part One of the Origins of Totalitarianism
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2 From the beginning, investigation and publication of documentary material have been guided by concern for criminal activities, and the selection has usually been made for the purpose of prosecution of war criminals. The result is that a great amount of highly interesting material has been neglected. The book mentioned in note 1 is a very welcome exception from the rule.
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3 See Merle Fainsod, Smolensk under Soviet Rule, Cambridge, 1958, pp. 210, 306, 365, etc.
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Ibid., pp. 73, 93.
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5 To an estimated nine to twelve million victims of the First Five Year Plan (1928–1933) must be added the victims of the Great Purge—an estimated three million executed while five to nine million were arrested and deported. (See Robert C. Tucker’s important introduction, “Stalin, Bukharin, and History as Conspiracy,” to the new edition of the verbatim report of the 1938 Moscow Trial, The Great Purge Trial, New York, 1965.) But all these estimates seem to fall short of the actual number. They do not take into account mass executions of which nothing was known until “German occupation forces discovered a mass grave in the city of Vinnitsa containing thousands of bodies of persons executed in 1937 and 1938.” (See John A. Armstrong, The Politics of Totalitarianism. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1934 to the Present, New York, 1961, pp. 65 f.) Needless to say, this recent discovery makes the Nazi and the Bolshevik systems look even more than before like variations of the same model.—To what extent the mass killings of the Stalin era are in the center of the present opposition can best be seen in the trial of Sinyavsky and Daniel, of which the New York Times Magazine published key sections on April 17, 1966, and from which I quoted.
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Tucker, op. cit., pp. XVII–XVIII.
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7 Quoted from Merle Fainsod, How Russia Is Ruled, Cambridge, 1959, p. 516.—Abdurakhman Avtorkhanov (in The Reign of Stalin, published under the pseudonym Uralov in London, 1953) tells of a secret meeting of the Central Committee of the Party in 1936 after the first show trials, in which Bukharin reportedly accused Stalin of changing Lenin’s party into a police state and was supported by more than two-thirds of the members. The story, especially the allegedly strong support of Bukharin in the Central Committee, does not sound very plausible; but even if true, in view of the fact that this meeting occurred while the Great Purge was already in full swing, the story does not indicate an organized opposition but rather its opposite. The truth of the matter, as Fainsod rightly points out, seems to be that “wide-spread mass discontent” was quite common, especially among the peasants, and that up to 1928, “at the beginning of the First Five Year Plan strikes ...were not uncommon,” but that such “oppositional moods never come to a focus in any form of organized challenge to the regime,” and that by 1929 or 1930 “every organizational alternative had faded from the scene” if it ever had existed before. (See Smolensk under Soviet Rule, pp. 449 if.)
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8 “The wonder,” as Fainsod, op. cit., p. 38, points out, “is not merely that the Party was victorious, but that it managed to survive at all.”
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9 Ibid., pp. 49 ff.—A report from 1929 recounts violent antisemitic outbursts during a meeting; the Komsomol people “in the audience kept silent.... The impression was obtained that they were all in agreement with the anti-Jewish statements” (p. 445).
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10 All reports from 1926 show a significant “decline in so-called counter-revolutionary outbreaks, a measure of the temporary truce which the regime had worked out with the peasantry.” Compared with 1926, the reports from 1929–1930 “read like communiques from a flaming battle front” (p. 177).
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11 Ibid., pp. 252 ff.
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12 Ibid., especially pp. 240 ff. and 446 if.
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13 Ibid. All such statements are taken from GPU reports; see especially pp. 248 f. But it is quite characteristic that such remarks became much less frequent after 1934; the beginning of the Great Purge.
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14 Ibid., p. 310.
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15 This alternative is usually overlooked in the literature because of the understandable, but historically untenable, conviction of a more or less smooth development from Lenin to Stalin. It is true that Stalin almost always talked in Leninist terms, so that it sometimes looks as though the only difference between the two men lay in the brutality or “insanity” of Stalin’s character. Whether or not this was a conscious ruse on the side of Stalin, the truth of the matter is—as Tucker, op. cit., p. XVI, rightly observes—that “Stalin filled these old Leninist concepts with a new, distinctively Stalinist content ... The chief distinctive feature was the quite un-Leninist emphasis upon conspiracy as the hallmark of the present epoch.”
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16 See Fainsod, op. cit., especially pp. 365 f.
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17 Ibid., p. 93 and p. 71: It is quite characteristic that messages on all levels habitually stressed the “obligations undertaken to Comrade Stalin,” and not to the regime or the party or the country. Nothing perhaps underlines more convincingly the similarities of the two systems than what Ilya Ehrenburg and other Stalinist intellectuals have to say today in their efforts to justify their past or simply to report what they actually thought during the Great Purge. “Stalin knew nothing about the senseless violence committed against the Communists, against the Soviet intelligentsia,” “they conceal it from Stalin” and “if only someone would tell Stalin about it,” or, finally, the culprit was not Stalin at all but the respective chief of police. (Quoted from Tucker, op. cit., p. XIII.) Needless to add, this was precisely what the Nazis had to say after the defeat of Germany.
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18 Ibid., pp. 166 ff.
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19 The words are lifted from the appeal of a “class-alien element” in 1936: “I do not want to be a criminal without a crime” (p. 229).
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20 An interesting OGPU report from 1931 stresses this new “complete passivity,” this horrible apathy which the random terror against innocent people produced. The report mentions the great difference between the former arrests of enemies of the regime when “an arrested man was led by two militiamen” and the mass arrests when “one militiaman may lead groups of people and the latter calmly walk and no one flees” (p. 248).
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21 Ibid., p. 135.
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22 Ibid., pp. 57–58. For the mounting mood of plain hysteria in these mass denunciations, see especially pp. 222, 229 ff., and the lovely story on p. 235, where we hear how one of the comrades has come to think “that Comrade Stalin has taken a conciliatory attitude toward the Trotskyite-Zinovievite group,” a reproach which at the time meant immediate expulsion from the Party at least. But no such luck. The next speaker accused the man who had tried to outdo Stalin of being “politically disloyal,” whereupon the former promptly “confessed” his error.
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23 Strangely enough, Fainsod himself still draws such conclusions from a mass of evidence that points into the opposite direction. See his last chapter, especially pp. 453 ff.—It is even stranger that this misreading of the factual evidence should be shared by so many authors in the field. To be sure, hardly any of them would go so far in this subtle justification of Stalin as Isaac Deutscher in his biography, but many still insist that “Stalin’s ruthless actions were ...a way to the creation of a new equilibrium of forces�
� (Armstrong, op cit., p. 64) and designed to offer “a brutal but consistent solution of some of the basic contradictions inherent in the Leninist myth” (Richard Lowenthal in his very valuable World Communism. The Disintegration of a Secular Faith, New York, 1964, p. 42). There are but few exceptions from this Marxist hangover, such as Richard C. Tucker (op. cit., p. XXVII), who says unequivocally that the Soviet “system would have been better off and far more equipped to meet the coming test of total war had there been no Great Purge, which was, in effect, a great wrecking operation in Soviet society.” Mr. Tucker believes that this refutes my “image” of totalitarianism, which, I think, is a misunderstanding. Instability is indeed a functional requisite of total domination, which is based on an ideological fiction and presupposes that a movement, as distinguished from a party, has seized power. The hallmark of this system is that substantial power, the material strength and well-being of the country, is constantly sacrificed to the power of organization, just as all factual truths are sacrificed to the demands of ideological consistency. It is obvious that in a contest between material strength and organizational power, or between fact and fiction, the latter may come to grief, and this happened in Russia as well as Germany during the Second World War. But this is no reason to underestimate the power of totalitarian movements. It was the terror of permanent instability that helped to organize the satellite system, and it is the present stability of Soviet Russia, its detotalitarization, which, on one side, has greatly contributed to her present material strength, but which, on the other, has caused her to lose control of her satellites.
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24 See the interesting details (Fainsod, op. cit., pp. 345–355) about the 1929 campaign to eliminate “reactionary professors” against the protests of party and Komsomol members as well as the student body, who saw “no reason to replace the excellent non-Party” professors; whereupon of course a new commission promptly reported “the large number of class-alien elements among the student body.” That it was one of the main purposes of the Great Purge to open the careers to the younger generation has always been known.
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25 Armstrong, op. cit., p. 319, argues that the importance of Marshal Zhukov’s intervention in the inner-party struggle has been “highly exaggerated” and maintains that Khrushchev “triumphed without any need for military intervention,” because he was “supported by the Party apparatus.” This seems not to be true. But it is true that “many foreign observers,” because of the role of the army in support of Khrushchev against the party appai atus, arrived at the mistaken conclusion of a lasting power increase of the military at the expense of the party, as though the Soviet Union was about to change from a party dictatorship into a military dictatorship.
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26 lbid., p. 320.
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27 See ibid., p. 325.
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28 Ibid., pp. 339 ff.
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29 See V. Stanley Vardys, “How the Baltic Republics fare in the Soviet Union,” in Foreign Affairs, April, 1966.
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30 Armstrong, op. cit., pp. 235 ff.
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31 Fainsod, op. cit., p. 56.
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32 Armstrong, op. cit., p. 236.
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1 To the modern historian rights and liberties granted the court Jews during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries may appear to be only the forerunners of equality: court Jews could live wherever they liked, they were permitted to travel freely within the realm of their sovereign, they were allowed to bear arms and had rights to special protection from local authorities. Actually these court Jews, characteristically called Generalprivilegierte Juden in Prussia, not only enjoyed better living conditions than their fellow Jews who still lived under almost medieval restrictions, but they were better off than their non-Jewish neighbors. Their standard of living was much higher than that of the contemporary middle class, their privileges in most cases were greater than those granted to the merchants. Nor did this situation escape the attention of their contemporaries. Christian Wilhelm Dolim, the outstanding advocate of Jewish emancipation in eighteenth-century Prussia, complained of the practice, in force since the time of Frederick William I, which granted rich Jews “all sorts of favors and support” often “at the expense of, and with neglect of diligent legal [that is, non-Jewish] citizens.” In Denkwiirdigketien meiner Zeit, Lemgo, 1814–1819, IV, 487.
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2 Jacob Lestschinsky, in an early discussion of the Jewish problem, pointed out that Jews did not belong to any social class, and spoke of a “Klasseneinschiebsel” (in Weltwirtschafts-Archiv, 1929, Band 30, 123 if.), but saw only the disadvantages of this situation in Eastern Europe, not its great advantages in Western and Central European countries.
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3 For example, under Frederick II after the Seven Years’ War, a decided effort was made in Prussia to incorporate the Jews into a kind of mercantile system. The older general Juden-reglement of 1750 was supplanted by a system of regular permits issued only to those inhabitants who invested a considerable part of their fortune in new manufacturing enterprises. But here, as everywhere else, such government attempts failed completely.
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4 Felix Priebatsch (“Die Judenpolitik des fürstlichen Absolutismus im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert,” in Forschungen und Versuche zur Geschichte des Mittelalters und der Neuzeit, 1915) cites a typical example from the early eighteenth century: “When the mirror factory in Neuhaus, Lower Austria, which was subsidized by the administration, did not produce, the Jew Wertheimer gave the Emperor money to buy it. When asked to take over the factory he refused, stating that his time was taken up with his financial transactions.”
See also Max Köhler, “Beiträge zur neueren jüdischen Wirtschaftsgeschichte. Die Juden in Halberstadt und Umgebung,” in Studien zur Geschichte der Wirtschaft und Ceisteskultur, 1927, Band 3.
In this tradition, which kept rich Jews from real positions of power in capitalism, is the fact that in 1911 the Paris Rothschilds sold their share in the oil wells of Baku to the Royal Shell group, after having been, with the exception of Rockefeller, the world’s biggest petroleum tycoons. This incident is reported in Richard Lewinsohn, Wie sie gross und reich wurden, Berlin, 1927.
André Sayou’s Statement (“Les Juifs” in Revue Economique Internationale, 1932) in his polemic against Werner Sombart’s identification of Jews with capitalist development, may be taken as a general rule: “The Rothschilds and other Israelites who were almost exclusively engaged in launching state loans and in the international movement of capital, did not try at ail ...to create great industries.”
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5 The influence, however, of mercantile experiments on future developments can hardly be overrated. France was the only country where the mercantile system was tried consistently and resulted in an early flourishing of manufactures which owed their existence to state interference; she never quite recovered from the experience. In the era of free enterprise, her bourgeoisie shunned unprotected investment in native industries while her bureaucracy, also a product of the mercantile system, survived its collapse. Despite the fact that the bureaucracy also lost all its productive functions, it is even today more characteristic of the country and a greater impediment to her recovery than the bourgeoisie.
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6 This had been the case in England since Queen Elizabeth’s Marrano banker and the Jewish financiers of Cromwell’s armies, until one of the twelve Jewish brokers admitted to the London Stock Exchange was said to have handled one-quarter of all government loans of his day (see Salo W. Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews, 1937, V
ol. II: Jews and Capitalism); in Austria, where in only forty years (1695–1739), the Jews credited the government with more than 35 million florins and where the death of Samuel Oppenheimer in 1703 resulted in a grave financial crisis for both state and Emperor; in Bavaria, where in 1808 80 per cent of all government loans were endorsed and negotiated by Jews (see M. Grunwald, Samuel Oppenheimer und sein Kreis, 1913); in France, where mercantile conditions were especially favorable for the Jews, Colbert already praised their great usefulness to the state (Baron, op. cit., loc. cit.), and where in the middle of the eighteenth century the German Jew, Liefman Calmer, was made a baron by a grateful king who appreciated services and loyalty to “Our state and Our person” (Robert Anchel, “Un Baron Juif Français au 18e siècle, Liefman Calmer,” in Souvenir et Science, I, pp. 52–55); and also in Prussia where Frederick H’s Münjuden were titled and where, at the end of the eighteenth century, 400 Jewish families formed one of the wealthiest groups in Berlin. (One of the best descriptions of Berlin and the role of the Jews in its society at the turn of the eighteenth century is to be found in Wilhelm Dilthey, Das Leben Schleiermachers, 1870, pp. 182 if.).
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7 Early in the eighteenth century, Austrian Jews succeeded in banishing Eisemenger’s Entdecktes Judentum, 1703, and at the end of it, The Merchant of Venice could be played in Berlin only with a little prologue apologizing to the (not emancipated) Jewish audience.
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