Jewish Pogroms

As an American German-Russian Bear, AGR Bear, you have provided us with many very valuable insights into Christian-Jewish relations in the United States in the last century. I do think you should write about your family, and your family's memories of its antecedents, in detail, if you haven't done so already, and give these notes to some scholar who will use them properly and with appropriate respect.

I don't think there were many or any Lutherans or Methodists in the Bolshevik leadership during the October Revolution and ensuing civil war in Russia, but somebody correct me if I'm wrong. My impression is that most were Russian Orthodox (Christian) believers by upbringing, if not by current faith, and some were Jewish, but not by any stretch of the imagination did Jews make up the majority of Bolsheviks. This is an old White Russian canard, and one that still reflects very badly, I must say, on their cause, whether they were monarchists or liberals or whatever. It's one of the reasons why most Western scholars, to this day, do not regard the murder of the imperial family and their retinue as a serious historical issue, much less,  as Richard Pipes argued, a watershed in the history of Soviet political persecution. Because for generations the White cause so infected and infested the story of the Romanov murders with very real, virulant anti-Semitism (and it's alive even now - the same right-wing extremist pestilence can be observed as an undercurrent even in a famous recent Russian film about the Romanovs, where dark, Semitic types like Trotsky - who was actually absent at the time - are depicted as evil political machinators deliberating over the execution of the Romanovs.)

By the way, Hitler took this White smear campaign very seriously, indeed, as actual fact, in his struggle against "Russian Bolshevism." But then, when Hitler was still a relatively untried politician, most German conservatives were anti-Bolshevik and anti-Semitic as well, and they tended to unite the two hatreds without any respect for nuance or, for that matter, fact as opposed to fiction.

I have never spoken to anyone who was a part of a pogrom under the Romanovs.

Wouldn't that be kind of hard, unless you had a time machine.  The Romanov dynasty ended nearly a century ago.

 I had and have  more than one  time machine, in fact, I had many, because my time machines  were all  the old timers who sat around telling me stories of the Motherland and why they left and became pioneers in the USA.  I am almost 70.    I knew all my grandparents, the oldest born in the mid 1880s, I knew four of my great grandparents, the oldest born in the early 1860s....  I was like a sponge that soaked in everything about my family and their friends' families and our neighbors' families.... There are stories which touch historical events which  I heard which were absent from college history and  books....  Of course most stories do become exaggerated  with the telling but most of what I heard had the foundation of truth.  

AGRBear

...[in part]...Because for generations the White cause so infected and infested the story of the Romanov murders with very real, virulant anti-Semitism (and it's alive even now - the same right-wing extremist pestilence can be observed as an undercurrent even in a famous recent Russian film about the Romanovs, where dark, Semitic types like Trotsky - who was actually absent at the time - are depicted as evil political machinators deliberating over the execution of the Romanovs.)

...[in part]...

Good example is found in the book THE LAST DAYS OF THE ROMANOVS by George Gustav Telberg and Robert Wilton  pps 402 - 401:
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>>In the autumn of 1915 there assembled in Vienna the representatives of the German and Austrian General-Staffs to discuss a plan for the promotion of a revolutionary movement in Russia.  It was then that all the outlines of the "Russians" revolution were laid down; it was this meeting that the leading actors in the Red tragedy were chosen; the Lenins and the Sverdlovs and the host of Jewish wreckers, who spent the interval between their engagement and their appearance on the Russian state in the calm of Swiss resorts, studying and rehearsing their parts.

The money that financed the "Russian " revolution was German money..."

And thus it came to pass that the Germans who slew the Tsar and the Jews who organized, aided and abetted the murder each left his mark upon the walls of the Ipatiev's house.>>
---------

Yes,  the Jews were blamed for a great deal, including the creation of the terrorists known as the Bolsheviks.

 I  have no problem that Lenin, Sverdlov, Trotsky, Stalin are drawn as  terrible human creatures in cartoons.  Not because they were Jewish.  They were the "bad guys".   The extremist, however, go beyond the "Pale" to show these men were "evil" because they were Jews.    The extremists were and are so very very wrong.

AGRBear

I had and have  more than one  time machine, in fact, I had many, because my time machines  were all  the old timers who sat around telling me stories of the Motherland and why they left and became pioneers in the USA.  I am almost 70.

 

Oh, I guess you would have known some people from back then.

[....all it does is give you a small window in this particular person's/family's life and doing!But it doesn't give you the history and circumstances of a nation!]

We cannot forget that although part of history,
one person's or family's circumstances doesn't change the history of a nation!

I could tell you that very many Jews (hundreds) lined the streets at the funeral of my Great- Great Grand Mother
to honor her for what she did to help them, or that my blood relatives lost their lifes in Treblinka,
or that my family was hiding many of them during the worst of times!
....all it does is give you a small window in this particular person's/family's life and doing!
But it doesn't give you the history and circumstances of a nation!

I  have no problem that Lenin, Sverdlov, Trotsky, Stalin are drawn as  terrible human creatures in cartoons.  Not because they were Jewish.  They were the "bad guys".   The extremist, however, go beyond the "Pale" to show these men were "evil" because they were Jews.    The extremists were and are so very very wrong.

AGRBear

Actually, we should both make it clear at this point, AGRBear, that while Trotsky and Sverdlov (as far as I know) were raised as Jews, Lenin was Orthodox from birth (I believe he only had one Jewish ancestor in his entire family tree - interestingly enough, there was also a Kalmyk grandfather or great-grandfather - but the majority of his forebears were ethnic Russians, Orthodox by faith - in other words, Lenin was a true representative of the Russian empire, that is, multicultural!). And of course Stalin was not Jewish by any stretch of the imagination, he was an ethnic Georgian raised in the Orthodox Church who spent his formative years in an Orthodox seminary training to be a priest. The big joke with Stalin is that his entire style of public speaking as a dictator is said to have reflected this seminary upbringing - i.e., the speaker asks rhetorical questions, over and over again, like a priest, and the congregation (subjects, in this case) responds with well-rehearsed, utterly predictable, unanimous, and dogmatically correct "answers."

[....all it does is give you a small window in this particular person's/family's life and doing!But it doesn't give you the history and circumstances of a nation!]

We cannot forget that although part of history,
one person's or family's circumstances doesn't change the history of a nation!

I could tell you that very many Jews (hundreds) lined the streets at the funeral of my Great- Great Grand Mother
to honor her for what she did to help them, or that my blood relatives lost their lifes in Treblinka,
or that my family was hiding many of them during the worst of times!
....all it does is give you a small window in this particular person's/family's life and doing!
But it doesn't give you the history and circumstances of a nation!

Nicolay, I think it's precisely because memoirs and diaries provide us with such a window into the "history and circumstances of a nation" that they are so important for posterity - as for that matter is any form of autobiography, any form of eyewitness testimony that is a sincere attempt on the part of the writer to remember the past as it happened.

Fortunately the Jews are the People of the Book, as it's been said, so many "ordinary" individuals of this religion have left behind them recorded testimonies of how the horrendous events of the 20th century affected them directly. (As opposed to the example of the early 20th-century Russian peasantry, largely illiterate, who left behind scant personal records indeed of the Russian Revolutions, Civil War, War Communism, collectivization, and the great famines of the early 1920s and 1930s. Which is one reason why their plight has until recent years been so little appreciated in the West.)

One person, one lone individual, can indeed provide valuable information about an entire nation and people - look at Victor Klemperer's diaries of the years 1933-1945, even his diaries before and after those dates (he kept diaries his entire life, and recorded every major and minor event in it in the minutest detail). What a treasure trove these diaries have proven to be for contemporary historians who study Germany before, during, and after the Third Reich, not to mention historians of the Holocaust!

I  have no problem that Lenin, Sverdlov, Trotsky, Stalin are drawn as  terrible human creatures in cartoons.  Not because they were Jewish.  They were the "bad guys".   The extremist, however, go beyond the "Pale" to show these men were "evil" because they were Jews.    The extremists were and are so very very wrong.

AGRBear

Actually, we should both make it clear at this point, AGRBear, that while Trotsky and Sverdlov (as far as I know) were raised as Jews, Lenin was Orthodox from birth (I believe he only had one Jewish ancestor in his entire family tree - interestingly enough, there was also a Kalmyk grandfather or great-grandfather - but the majority of his forebears were ethnic Russians, Orthodox by faith - in other words, Lenin was a true representative of the Russian empire, that is, multicultural!). And of course Stalin was not Jewish by any stretch of the imagination, he was an ethnic Georgian raised in the Orthodox Church who spent his formative years in an Orthodox seminary training to be a priest. The big joke with Stalin is that his entire style of public speaking as a dictator is said to have reflected this seminary upbringing - i.e., the speaker asks rhetorical questions, over and over again, like a priest, and the congregation (subjects, in this case) responds with well-rehearsed, utterly predictable, unanimous, and dogmatically correct "answers."

I knew that!

I must have had a senior moment when I added Stalin to the mix.  

I believe Lenin's mother's father's family was German-Russian and a grandmother's religion was  Jewish.

Thanks for corrections.

AGRBear