Part III
'I can imagine that in New York and throughout the United States the Jews are holding pow-wows all night long now that they have been granted free and equal rights in Russia.' (30) [+]
'I then asked Boris to take me to the Jewish market. This is one of the sights of Petrograd. It covers about four blocks and is full of little shops owned by Jews. You can buy everything under the sun there. Everything stolen is brought there, and if you want to buy a machine-gun, a rifle, or anything else, you can find it. This is one reason why the Jews in Russia have such a hard time. They will buy anything they think they can make money on. The people say they are buying up army guns and that they are in the pay of the Germans.
I saw thousands of soldiers in the old clothes section selling their uniforms, underwear, shoes and whatever they had. You can trade a pair of new shoes for a pair not so good and get a little money on the side. We spent a whole morning in this place. I looked at a great many pieces of jewelry. Most of this is loot, stolen during the revolution. I saw a watch that had blood-stains on it. A diamond necklace I could have bought for one-tenth of its value.' (31) [+]
'Jewish Chaplains are now at the front and we also see daily Jewish officers in the army. At the front I have seen thousands of Jews in uniform and ten per cent of the Death Battalions are Jews.' (32) [+-]
'My husband, without trying any byways or protections, intrigues or bribes, had merely spoken with the hotel man who looked after such documents for those living in the house. They had ended by driving together to Smolny one morning, to ask the permission necessary, before applying to the municipal police for passports to go beyond the frontiers. At Smolny, where they had been scarcely noticed, a soldier had directed them to a large room, on the door of which they saw written "Passports." Here they had knocked, been admitted, and found themselves opposite a Jewess, who wrote out the application which Cantacuzene had signed.' (33) [+]
‘To-day Gebhard lunched with Graf Oppersdorff to meet the Russian revolutionary representative Joffe. It was very interesting, of course, although they had to avoid politics. Gebhard describes him as a clever, ordinary international Jew, who has been all over the world and speaks every language. He praised England tremendously, admiring especially the methods of English politics and colonization.
How curious it is to note the immense power which a handful of Jews have suddenly gained in the country which until now was the seat of absolute despotism, and where for centuries the Jews have suffered such a martyrdom of cruel oppression. It almost looks sometimes as if our little continent were destined to be the bone for America and the Jews to pick.’ (34) [-]
‘I recently became well acquainted with Mr. Morris Gordin, an idealistic Russian-born Jew, who came to Chicago years ago and was a protégé in radicalism of Jane Addams’ Hull House. (His statement that no one could get far in the Red movement without the approval of the Hull House group supports my own impressions from research.) From Hull House, he was sent to live at the home of a University of Chicago professor whose heiress wife was supplying $1,000 a week to Red strikers, for further tutelage. He organized for the pro-Soviet Amalgamated Clothing Workers’ Union under Sidney Hillman, now of Roosevelt’s National Labor Board (see pages 104 and 290 of “The Red Network�), and left from the Communist Party of Chicago to go to Russia, where he acted as Press Commissar of the Comintern and as a Party leader in the Ukraine.’ (35)
‘Under Roosevelt’s inspiration and promises of rapid unionization under Section 81 of the NRA, the A. F. of L. took back the left wing pro-Soviet Amalgamated Clothing Workers’ Union headed by Sidney Hillman., Roosevelt’s Labor Board appointee, which had been ejected by the A. F. of L. in 1914 for radicalism.
The subsequent election of a Socialist Party leader, David Dubinsky, head of the socialist International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union, member of the Jewish Socialist Verband, formerly exiled to Siberia for Red revolutionary activities, as vice-president of the A. F. of L., was a lamentable, historic turn to the left.’ (36)
‘Another or Mrs. Roosevelt’s fellow committee members was Mary Van Kleeck, associate with Communist Party leaders on various committees and author of a Communist Party pamphlet in conjunction with Earl Browder, secretary of the Communist Party; another was Russian-born Jacob Billikopf, active in Jewish organizations, trustee of “The Nation� (revolutionary Socialist magazine) and “The Survey� (socialistic magazine), trustee of Harvard University (censured for its communistic trend and Government-supported), vice president of the socialistic American Association for Old Age Security, and now according to the communist Daily Worker (5/6/36), chairman of Roosevelt’s National Labor Relations Board. The Daily Worker reported that he was to preside at a meeting of the communist Friends of the Soviet Union, 5/8/36, at which James Waterman Wise (son of Rabbi Stephen S. Wise) of the communist People’s Press was to speak on the subject “The Jew in Soviet Russia�.’ (37)
‘It is not strange that the “spade work� which was done by the immigrant Red revolutionary, Russian-Jewish exiles, who in 1915, over twenty years ago, had already organized 500,000 of their race in the United States, is also bearing fruit, and that this long-time agitation for radicalism in Jewish organizations’ should be giving rise to the unjust impression that every Jew is naturally a Communist-Socialist.
It was 300,000 of this Socialist Jewish bloc who organized support for La Follette and Wheeler in 1924 on the Socialist-Progressive ticket, which polled nearly five million votes, and it is this same bloc which is now backing Roosevelt, led by Socialists Sidney Hillman, David Dubinsky (exiled to Siberia for Russian revolutionary activities), etc, in Labor’s Non-Partisan League.’ (38)
‘Thus the Morning Freiheit, alone, catering solely to Communist Yiddish-speaking Jews, claimed then about one-fifth of the paid circulation of the entire Communist press.
When a well-meaning Christian writer attempted to combat anti-Semitism by stating that the Jews play a negligible role in the Communist party, he supported this with the worst possible argument that the Jewish Federation of the Communist Party has but 15,000 members, since, if this is correct, it means that of the 40,000 members admitted by the Party in 1936 over one-third are Jewish.
But, as Francis Ralston Welsh has said, even if most of the Communists are Jews, it does not follow that most of the Jews are Communists.’ (39)
‘It was no accident that German fascist opposition to Communism became anti-Semitic, whereas Italian fascist opposition did not. The Reds in Italy, unlike Germany, were not predominately Jewish.’ (40) [-]
‘To quote the “Call of youth�, organ of the youth branch of the Jewish Socialist Workmen’s Circle (March, 1936):
“A great percentage of young Jews in the Soviet are officials, and are thus arousing the envy of our groups of the Russian population who still remember the ‘rightless’ status of the Jews in the former regime.�’ (41)
‘“In the spring of 1933 some 75 families, principally Jewish, hailing from New York, Chicago, Detroit, and other cities took over some 9,000 aches of reclaimed land, of the Owosso Sugar Beat Plantation, near Alicia, Michigan, and organized the Sunrise Cooperative Farm. The present secretary of the commune is Joseph Cohen, who is its motivating power, and principal spokesman.’ (42)
‘Socialism has made terrible inroads among the Jews.’ (43)
‘“Parvus� is the pseudonym of one of the most sinister figures in the history of the Socialist movement, Dr. Alexander Helfandt. Born at Odessa, of German-Jewish descent, he studied in Germany and in the early eighteen-nineties attained prominence as a prolific and brilliant contributor to the German Socialist review, Die Neue Zeit. He was early “exiled� from Russia, but it was suspect by a great many Socialists that in reality his “exile� was simply a device to cover employment in the Russian Secret Service as a spy and informer, for which the prestige he had gained in Socialist circles was a valuable aid.’ (44)
‘The headquarters of the Mission, then, arrived at Andijan, in the train, early one morning, when nobody was about, only to be pounced upon by a patrol of Bolsheviks, commanded by a Galician Jew. The truculent tone and manner of this wretch made ti quite clear to us that he had telegraphic instructions from the Tashkend Soviet to “double-cross� us.’ (45) [+]
‘In the revolution his brother was barbarously murdered by a Jew commissar, and now he himself was in our service: officially described as “umptieth Tiflis Grenadiers, attached Guides.�’ (46) [+-]
‘The real seat of trouble at this time was at Petrograd. There the German agents swarmed. One could hear them talk at the street-corners, in every assembly, and in every committee. By this time they were quite brazen in their statements. The most radical of these agents were Russian Jews who had returned from America.’ (47) [+]
‘I was in the hands of two sailors, a soldier and the Jewish chief agents of the Extraordinary Committee to Combat the Counter-Revolution, which is the Bolshevie’s chief weapon for maintaining and spreading the Red Reign of Terror.’ (48) [+]
‘At the Foreign Office we met a Jew named Contorovitch, who spoke English fluently. He furnished me with rooms at the Foreign Office Guest House at No. 10 Mala Haritonofskaya, which formerly was the home of a wealthy German merchant.’ (49) [+]
‘In arranging for my passport to be vised for England I came into close contact with one Rosenberg, a Jew, who had spent several years in London as a master tailor in an East End sweatshop. In 1917 he was secretary to Raymond Robins of the American Red Cross in Petrograd. When I arrived in Moscow he was in charge of the Western Section of the Foreign Office, and as the agent of the Vetchika had the handling of all foreigners in Russia.’ (50) [+]
References for Part III
(30) Donald Thompson, 1918, 'Donald Thompson in Russia', 1st Edition, The Century Co.: New York, pp. 123-124.
(31) Ibid., pp. 166-167. The mention of the rumour that the jews were in league with the Germans should not be taken literally, but rather as the idea that the jews were natural traitors and would look to anyone or anything who could better their personal and/or collective situation (i.e. hence 'in league with the Germans' who were then, or rather had been until recently, 'the enemy').
(32) Ibid. p. 282. I have marked this source as potentially problematic, because Thompson is telling us about his knowledge of the front, but does not tell us how he knew these things or how he could tell that 'thousands of jews were in uniform'. This is likely second-hand information that Thompson is passing along as first-hand information (and also applies to his assertion about the percentage of jews in the 'Death Squads').
(33) Princess Cantacuzene, 1919, 'Revolutionary Days: Recollections of Romanoffs and Bolsheviki 1914-1917', 1st Edition, Small, Maynard & Company: Boston, p. 358
(34) Princess Evelyn Bluecher, 1920, ‘An English Wife in Berlin: A Private Memoir of Events, Politics, and Daily Life in Germany Throughout the War and the Social Revolution of 1918’, 1st Edition, Constable: London, p. 246. I have marked this as potentially unreliable as Bluecher seems to be merely reporting what she had heard rather than what she has observed herself to be true.
(35) Elizabeth Dilling, 1936, ‘The Roosevelt Red Record And Its Background’, 1st Edition, Self-Published: Chicago, p. 8. It is worth noting that Sidney Hillman who is mentioned by Dilling in the quotation was also jewish and a prominent ‘labour activist’ in the United States. One should also note that when Dilling wrote ‘The Roosevelt Red Record And Its Background’ she was overtly sympathetic to jews and had in fact destroyed a prominent anti-Communist organisation, the Paul Reveres of Colonel Edwin Hadley, because she regarded its founder, Hadley, as an anti-Semite (which is debateable, but he certainly had a marked aversion to jews and was an adherent [possibly indirectly] of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion having either read Henry Ford’s ‘The International Jew’ or L. Fry’s ‘Waters Flowing Eastwards’, which put forth the theories he uses in some of his somewhat obscure pamphlets) and could not work with him, because of it. That she changed her views later and published anti-Semitic work in the 1950s and 1960s is irrelevant to her value as a secondary source.
(36) Ibid., p. 41. When Dilling speaks of the A. F. of L. she means the American Federation of Labor.
(37) Ibid., p. 79. Rabbi Stephen S. Wise was a very prominent Zionist Reform rabbi in the United States and among his many claims to fame is the fact that he co-founded the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People). For more information about Wise and his views see his autobiography Stephen Wise, 1949, ‘Challenging Years: The Autobiography of Stephen Wise’, 1st Edition, G. P. Putnam’s Sons: New York, which is rather revealing. It also contains some useful quotations and illuminating comments.
(38) Ibid., p. 156. We should note that the source for the 500,000 jews (given on pp. 158-159 of the same work) is the 1917-1918 ‘Jewish Communal Register’, pp. 1447-1454, and her assertion about the 300,000 jews supporting La Follette and Wheeler is sourced from the ‘New York Times’ of the 22nd of July 1924, which is stated on p. 98 of the same work. We should incidentally remind ourselves that Hillman and Dubinsky were both jewish. It is also worth noting that later on pp. 156-161 Dilling describes jewish anti-Communists and her support of them as well as an odd conspiracy theory about communist jews deliberately encouraging anti-Semitism (so nobody can reasonably accuse her of anti-Semitism at this point in her career).
(39) Ibid., p. 160. Dilling here is using as her source Hamilton Fish’s findings in House Report 2290 in 1930.
(40) Ibid., p. 161. I have marked this quotation as potentially problematic because the KPD, to which we may presume Dilling is alluding, was not predominately Jewish: although many of those involved in its founding were. For an overtly sympathetic version of these events, which adequately covers the numerous jews involved in the marxist risings and the foundation of the KPD, please see Chris Harman’s, 1997, [1982], ‘The Lost Revolution: Germany 1918-23’, 2nd Edition, Bookmarks: London.
(41) Ibid., p. 162
(42) Ibid., p. 307. The source that Dilling is citing is the ‘Advisor’ for the 27th of May 1936.
(43) Joseph Mereto, 1920, ‘The Red Conspiracy’, 1st Edition, The National Historical Society: New York, p. 379
(44) John Spargo, 1919, ‘Bolshevism: The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy’, 1st Edition, Harper & Brothers: New York, pp. 311-312
(45) L. Blacker, 1922, ‘On Secret Patrol in High Asia’, 1st Edition, John Murray: London, pp. 34-35
(46) Ibid., pp. 221-222. I have marked this quotation as potentially unreliable, because it is not explained how Blacker or Abdulla Shah (the man whose brother had been murdered) knew that the commissar was a jew and with the ‘White’ propaganda asserting that nearly all commissars were jews at this time: it would be normal for both Blacker and Shah to label the commissar a jew without knowing whether he (or she) was or not.
(47) Florence MacLeod Harper, 1918, ‘Runaway Russia’, 1st Edition, The Century Co.: New York, p. 223. It should be noted that when MacLeod Harper talks of ‘German agents’ she is simply referring to the Germans as ‘the enemy’ on the logic that anybody who worked against Imperial Russia was therefore pro-German.
(48) Charles Edward Russell, 1919, ‘Bolshevism and the United States’, 1st Edition, The Bobbs-Merrill Company: Indianapolis, p. 266
(49) Arno Dosch-Fleurot, Hector Boon, 1921, ‘How Much Bolshevism Is There in America?/Russia from the Inside’, 1st Edition, Press Publishing Co. (New York World): New York, p. 33
(50) Ibid., p. 34
