| THE HANDSTAND | WINTER2011 |
the Jewish
“Empire of the Intellect”
By A. M. Burovsky
May 2, 2011
From Dan Michaels and Peter Myers
Andrei Burovsky's "Are the Jews the Most Advanced People on Earth?
Professor Professor Andrei Mikhailovich Burovsky, academic, writer,
slaughterer of sacred cows, and, it must be admitted straight off, a
hyperactive revisionist, has a cornucopia of interests ranging from
archaeology, the interaction between nature and societies, the formation
of the noosphere, and cross-cultural contacts, right up to the Jewish
question in Russia and worldwide. On all of these topics the professor
has taken strong, minority opinions. Politically, Burovsky is a member
of the All-Russian Socio-Political Eurasia Movement and has authored
several very popular books about Siberia.[1]
Burovsky writes about Jews in the way H. L. Mencken wrote about certain
Christian sects and pompous celebrities, i.e., boldly and without fear
of consequences. Like Mencken, Burovsky is a well-known
disturber-of-the-peace, iconoclast, and a prolific writer on subjects
both profane and sacred. But whereas Mencken dealt with the relatively
venial offences committed by members of what he called the ‘Boobeoisie’,
Burovsky deals with much heavier issues with far more serious
consequences. Unfortunately, Professor Burovsky lacks the literary skill
and sense of humor of the Bard of Baltimore and has attracted many
enemies from the ranks of his literary targets. But, most importantly,
it must be said that so long as the likes of Mencken in America,
Burovsky in Russia, and their like elsewhere are permitted to write and
be published, it is proof enough that freedom of speech and of the press
truly exists.
Burovsky does not write in the style of an academic but as a populist.
He does not try to convince by patient logical argument but by hammering
home his message. Sophisticated readers find his style rough and sloppy
while the common folk enjoy it.
In all, Burovsky has published some 134 works, including four monographs
and at least a dozen items on the Jewish question. The Library of
Congress has 28 of his books. Regrettably for the English-speaking
world, all are in Russian.
American readers might be somewhat uneasy about the bluntness of
Burovsky’s critical comments concerning Jewish activities that in much
of the West remain taboo under penalty of law. American writers, for the
most part establishment writers, tend to approach the Jewish question
with great caution, fear of offending, fear of retaliation, and
therefore in many cases they defer to the Jewish point of view. But not
Burovsky. Whether Burovsky is a loose cannon or a sharpshooter is
argued, but all agree that Jews are — for whatever reason — one of his
favorite topics.
Consider some excerpts and commentary from several of Burovsky’s most
recent books.[2]
In his most recent book, Are the Jews the Most Advanced People on
Earth?, Burovsky writes
Always, throughout history, you only have to give the Jews equal rights
and they swiftly move into the highest circles of their host society.
Comprising just 2–3% of the population of the particular country they
quickly represent a third, half, and at times the absolute majority of
its financial, intellectual, and even political elite. In some it evokes
delight, in others rage. It was thus in Hellenistic Egypt before the
birth of Christ, in the towns of Medieval Europe, in France in the 18th
Century, in Germany in the 19th Century, and in Russia the first half of
the 20th Century. The historical eras differed, the host countries
differed, and even the Jews were different, but the same process repeats
itself. How are the Jews able to be such keen competitors? Why under
different circumstances are they able to squeeze the Christians out of
commerce, science, art, education, and medicine? What constitutes their
advantage over all other nations? Is it their special racial
characteristics, that they consider themselves chosen by God, that they
support each other, the much talked about Jewish Masonic conspiracy, or
is it simply that the Jews are the most intellectually advanced people
on Earth? (p. 4)
In his Jewish Domination: Fabrication or Reality? he contends indignantly:
After World War II no one was supposed to be a racist, but the Jews were
permitted to be racists. Everyone was permitted to doubt the fact that
the communists murdered millions of people in Russia if they chose to,
but in many countries today a jail sentence awaits any individual who
commits Holocaust denial (imposed by the same gentlemen who devised the
law and had the chutzpah to teach us about freedom of speech!). Imagine
what a howl would be raised if Russia dared to kidnap Berezovsky from
England and subject him to a show trial and execution! But that’s
exactly what the Israelites (sic) did in the Eichmann case! Iran is
forbidden to violate the agreement on the proliferation of nuclear
weapons, but Israel can. How about the mutual hatred of Poles and
Ukrainians, or that of Tutsis and Hutu? [The Tutsis, incidentally,
consider themselves the descendants of Israelites.] How about the
extermination of Germans by the Czechs and Poles in 1944–45? You can
talk about those events and even name the nationality of the
perpetrators. That you can do. But just try to say who was behind the
extermination of the Russian nobility and intellectuals, the priests and
the officers, during the Civil War. If you dare to give the names of
those hangmen, you will be called a “cannibal or an anti-Semite”! Why,
with all the talk about all people being equal, does mankind recognize
one people as “more equal than the others”? Have not the Jews in this
way become a privileged layer in society immune from the law? Have not
the Jews become a kind of international nobility? And what is there to
threaten this “Jewish domination,” to threaten those who seek to dominate?
On the other hand, in The Jews: A Native People of Rus, he develops a
very non-standard account of the origin of the Jews in Russia:
Are the Jews aliens on Russian soil? Are they not the bold and clever
strangers, descendants of Semitic tribes that infiltrated Rus through
Byzantium and Poland? If so, why then are they so much like us? Why in
each Jewish generation are their children just like Slavs and Tartars?
Why do they love East Europe, its plains, forests, and rivers so much?
It is because Ashkenazi Jews are not strangers in our land, but one of
the native peoples of Russia! The many Jews in Ancient Rus are their
ancestors. Among the inhabitants of the Jewish Quarter in Medieval Kiev
were a large number of Slavs who had taken the giyur rite of conversion
to Judaism. The concept of monotheism appealed to many, Christianity had
not yet taken hold, and multitudes of people had accepted the
All-Powerful God through Judaism. Added to them came the Khazar converts
who joined the believers in a single God after the fall of the Khazar
Kaganate – a second mass source of Ashkenazi. Of course there was among
them the descendants of West European Jews. But were there many? More
than likely they were a vanishing minority. We are brothers with the
Jews by virtue of the land, history and fate we share. The expanses,
winds, sunrises and sunsets of our common Russia — enormous beautiful
Russia — are in our blood. Did you [Solzhenitsyn] say “Two hundred years
together”? No, it’s more like “1500 years together”!
And in his Jewish Pogroms: Grief Over Double Standards, his Russian
sensibilities speak:
To be sure, there is certainly no dirtier or viler word today than
‘pogrom’. It is one of the few Russian words that has been adopted by
all other languages but needs no translation. It is an ineradicable
stigma on our history. But just what is a pogrom? The Pocket Jewish
Encyclopedia defines it as “an attack on Jews by non-Jews for the
purpose of robbing or killing them.” This is to say that Jews without
exception are considered to be innocent victims of the accursed
pogromists. But is that really the case? Are there really no cases in
history in which the Jews themselves were the pogromists and hangmen?
In Truth about “Jewish Racism” he scolds Jews for their racism:
Any people who consider themselves biologically superior to others and
any state that preaches racism becomes an outcast and finds itself in
isolation, with but one exception — the Jews. Just imagine if, one day
you read that Russians must only marry other Russians and that marriages
between Russians and Jews are always unhappy. I guarantee there would be
an outburst of disapproval, protests, accusations of Russian Fascism,
and even judicial actions. However, the Hasidic journal L’Chaim openly
advocated marriage between Jews only, damning miscegenation with a rage
like that found only in Goebbels propaganda. Can you imagine Russia ever
celebrating Pogrom Day or Germany being proud of Auschwitz? Yet the Jews
openly celebrate Purim, praising the pogrom that their ancestors
inflicted on the Persians two and a half thousand years ago. Why is it
that this highly educated and cultured people are more infected with
racism than others? Why are we obliged to shut our eyes about it? How is
it possible for the Jews to do these things when they are categorically
forbidden to everyone else?
Professor Burovsky attributes much of Jewish worldly success to their
Old Testament God who commanded them to do as he ordered under threat of
cruel punishment and death. In order to learn and obey, it was essential
to be literate in Jewish writings. Thus, learning became a religious
obligation. New Testament Christians, on the other hand, have a loving,
forgiving God whose believers are obliged to emulate Him and His
example. Believing Christians may gain Heaven, but the tougher Jews do
better here on Earth. The compulsive messianic drive Jews exercise in
their undertakings also partially derives from their religious beliefs.
Zionism and Jewish nationalism are all messianic. The Jews, the
professor believes, are not hostile to non-Jews, they simply believe
they are superior, better educated, and on a higher intellectual level
than gentiles. This belief, too, probably derives from a religious
feeling associated with the concept of being chosen by God.
Professor Burovsky discounts the idea that differences in the Jewish
persona could be attributable to racial differences. His argument is
that, of the three basic existing races recognized by most Russian
anthropologists (i.e., Europeanoids, Mongoloids, Negroids), Jews easily
fit in among the Europeans. He does believe, however, that the Jewish
intellect has been further refined through a series of mutations the
Jews underwent in their migrations, forced and voluntary, from the Near
East to almost all countries in the world, including China. These
mutations, Burovsky believes, also induced interplay between genes and
intellect, resulting in a more advanced personality. In a sense, Jews
became colonizers throughout the world. Again, it was their religion
that bound them together as a distinct people.
Professor Burovsky believes that the answer to their success basically
lies in the great importance Jews through the ages have put on literacy
and learning— indeed, to such an extent that they have often succeeded
in establishing an “Empire of the Intellect” over the native peoples of
the host nations. Throughout history, massive illiteracy was the norm
for the mass of people in most countries, often even including the
ruling class that probably gained power by brute force, intrigue,
inheritance, or through charisma — none of which required any great
amount of intelligence, only a measure of cleverness. On the other hand,
almost all Jews were literate, giving them the edge in competition for
success in economic and financial activities. There exists a saying,
“There not many Jews, but one is plenty enough.”
Rulers in the West have usually hired Jews as advisors in financial
matters, essential to the very existence of the state. Jews also control
the mass media and use it to advance their own interests. The ultimate
dream of Jewish efforts, Burovsky maintains, was to create an ideal
socialist society, with themselves in charge, such as they hoped to
realize in the now defunct USSR and the tottering state of Israel. The
USSR dream, which was actually realized for a few decades (1917–1939),
became a nightmare for Christians.
As for the other dream, a nation of their own, Israel was indeed
established. Ever since, however, the Christians of the Near East have
been forced to evacuate their homelands and to emigrate. By the end of
the 20th Century, the Jewish Empire of the Intellect had reached its apogee.
In the early 20th Century, Burovsky observes, there was little
difference between those Jews determined to build socialism (communism)
in Russia and those Zionists sworn to establish a socialist Israel. The
only difference between the plans for the Soviet Union and those for
Israel was that the people in the USSR would not be required to speak
Hebrew.
The Communist state the Jews hoped to create was an entirely artificial
construct born of Jewish abstract thought. Jews, Burovsky observes, are
born ideologues and capable of creating an ideology or a religion out of
whole cloth. Communism lasted just over seventy years; it showed no
regard for non-Jewish human life, human aspirations, and most
importantly forbade any sort of spiritual life. As Burovsky notes, the
Russian people were not a flock of penguins waiting to be trained to
play a designated role in a contrived artificial society. Russia, after
all, had been a great nation for centuries before the ascendency of Jews
to power. In their pride and arrogance, the people that invented this
ideal society even hoped to impose it on all the peoples on Earth and
had agents in every country working toward that end. Another of
Burovsky’s books, Stalin’s Counterrevolution, discusses how the Red
Dictator succeeded in derailing Trotsky’s dream of world revolution in
favor of first building socialism in the USSR.
Today, however, at the dawn of the 21st Century, Burovsky continues,
traditional Jewish confidence has been sorely shaken by the collapse of
the Soviet Union and the anemic condition of Israel, now dependent on
constant financial infusions and armaments from Germany and the United
States. It has had to abandon many of its socialist dreams and face
reality. Israel has even had to abandon some of its socialist dreams and
adopt capitalism.
The professor argues that to sustain Israel the myth of the Holocaust
had to be created and supported by the victorious Allies in order to
suck more blood from what remains of Germany. Without the myth, the
state of Israel would probably never have been possible at all. Burovsky
insists that the fact that the Western Allies have had to pass laws
threatening imprisonment for anyone who dares to question the Israeli
and Allied version of the causes of World War II and the Holocaust is
proof that their proffered version cannot stand on its own feet.
Moreover, the passage of such laws makes a mockery of the West’s claim
of freedom of speech and of the press.
In this regard, Professor Burovsky introduces the concept of
“professional” Jews, referring to those thousands of Jews employed
throughout the world in institutes, museums, governments, universities,
information centers, and the like (often subsidized by the host nation)
that propagate and hope to perpetuate the official version of the
Holocaust, namely, that the Germans murdered six million innocent Jews
in homicidal gas chambers for no other reason but that they were Jewish.
These establishments are also in the business of lobbying for and
distributing “reparations” money to survivors as well as soliciting
donations. In some countries, these facilities have even succeeded in
having the government of the host country arrange for grade school
children to take field trips to visit them for indoctrination and
receive extra credit for doing so.
Burovsky identifies a new anti-Semitism. With laws already in place in
several countries in Europe to prevent their citizens from ever speaking
ill of Jews; the Jewish community has now also devised ways that make it
easier to label someone an anti-Semite. Knowing full well that citizens
living in countries with a Constitution that protects their freedom of
speech and opinion dread being labeled anti-Semitic because of possible
economic retaliation (job loss, character assassination, etc.), the
Jewish community has toughened political correctness standards. Now, any
utterance that displeases the professional Jewish watchdogs can be
declared anti-Semitic. This power is used as a truncheon to silence critics.
Ever since Hanukah was celebrated in the Kremlin in 1991 and the bevy of
newly appointed Jewish oligarchs took power, there has been no official
discrimination against Jews in Russia. Rather, Burovsky contends, if
anything, it would be more to the point to speak of discrimination
against Russians in Russia.
Professor Burovsky concludes his study of the Jews by predicting that
their domination of many spheres of Western life in the 20th century
will likely end in the 21st century — not because the Jews will abandon
their Empire of the Intellect, but because the host nations have learned
their Jewish lesson, i.e., they have tried with considerable success to
eliminate illiteracy and promote education for their own people. This
occurs when a point is reached in any particular country, where the Jews
have been dominant, that the people of the host nation decide to manage
their own affairs. The point is reached when the people finally realize
that their own traditional mores and values have been undermined and
replaced by alien values. The parting of the ways may be recognized and
peacefully accepted by both parties or it may result in expulsions or worse.
Burovsky claims that the rate of assimilation of Jews in non-Jewish
societies, especially in the United States, has been increasing and will
continue to increase through marriage with non-Jewish women because 1)
Jews now occupy the lion’s share of prestigious positions and represent
the most affluent and influential minority in the country; and 2)
because the differences between Jews and non-Jews will gradually disappear.
Furthermore, Burovsky contends, the 21st century will see the ascent of
Asian powers (China, India, Iran) to top positions in the Northern
Hemisphere, replacing Europeanoids. It is often forgotten, if ever fully
recognized, that Europeanoids have always been a small minority of the
world’s population of predominantly Mongoloids and Negroids. Chinese,
Hindi, and Farsi will soon be heard in the halls of power. English,
French, Russian, and German may still be heard faintly in the
background, no longer as power brokers but as supplicants. The West, and
together with it the Jewish Empire of the Intellect, will be gradually
eclipsed as surely as the sun rises in the East. Such is the picture
Burovsky draws of the future.
Burovsky’s writings have not been immune to criticism. In his defense,
the professor is very prolific, writes rapidly, and does not produce
elegant prose — as the saying goes, “There’s many a slip between the cup
and the lip.” Apparently, the professor’s mind works faster than his
hand can put his thoughts on paper. In some cases his very revisionism
seems more like the simple visceral contrariness of a crank as, for
example, when he argues in one book that the stagnation under Brezhnev
was actually good for Russia, and in another that Czar Peter I may be
called Peter the Great by some but to the Russian people of his day he
was the anti-Christ because of his imposed reforms and the great loss of
life in building Saint Petersburg. As yet another example, he wrote a
book with the title Napoleon the Savior of Russia.
In any case, it is the author’s arguments, not his style, that are more
important in the long run. As Chekhov commented about critics, “they are
like flies that sting the horse, but do not help in the plowing.”*
history :Stalin’s 1937 Counter-Revolution Against Trotskyism
From Dan Michaels and Peter Myers
Glorious 1937! In that year Stalin finally came to understand that it was Zionism, not Communism, that was being built in the USSR and he destroyed it. After 1937, Suvorov and Kutuzov, Nakhimov and Ushakov, Bogdan Khmelnitsky and the “Knight in Tiger Skin” became the national symbols. And the Russians, Ukrainians, Belorussians – all those whom the Zionists had destroyed and left to rot in prisons, labeled “nationalists” or “anti-Semites{"} – returned. General Viktor Filatov[1]
In his book Myths and the Truth about 1937: Stalin’s Counter-Revolution (YAZA-PRESS, Moscow, 2010, 288 pp.), Andrei Burovsky assumes the role of devil’s advocate or apologist for the crimes committed by Josef Stalin during the time of “The Great Purge.”
{Myths and truth about 1937: Stalin’s Counter-Revolution
Burovskiy A.M / Andrej}
This is a highly revisionist point of view, so a bit of biographical information is in order. Burovsky was born in Taganrog in SW Russia in July 1955. He majored in history at the Krasnoyarsk State Pedagogical Institute, defended his Candidate?s Dissertation (The Historical and Cultural Stages of the Development of the Paleolithic Yenisei River) at the Leningrad Branch of the Institute of Archaeology in 1987, and defended his Doctoral Dissertation (Problematics in Anthropo-Ecology in 1996. He was made a professor in 1998 and since that time has had a position at Krasnoyarsk University.
Burovsky is a prolific author (see, e.g., here). Aside from Burovsky’s 12 books on Jewish topics (I previously reviewed his Empire of the Intellect for TOO), he has written on a variety of subjects, including Noogenesis and the Formation of the Noosphere School, 1996; Anthropo-Ecosophia, 2009; Petersburg as a Geographic Phenomenon, 2003; Arian Ancestors, 2005;The Great Civil [sic] War, 1939-45, 2010; Russian Atlantis, 2007; The Novgorod Alternative: The True Capital of Rus; Peter the First: The Accursed Emperor, etc.
Burovsky’s view is that the events of 1937 did not represent the usual case in which the devil under indictment is accused of crimes against innocent victims, but rather a case in which the devil is alleged to have committed crimes against another devil of even greater evil; it was the war between Stalin and Trotsky. True, Stalin had succeeded in exiling his nemesis in 1929, but the spirit of Trotskyism, according to Burovsky, had permeated the entire communist establishment and the Red dictator was determined to eradicate it.
The author refers to the war between the two devils as Stalin’s counter-revolution because, until Stalin undertook the great purge, the revolution and the Communist state had been overwhelmingly a Jewish enterprise with Lenin and Trotsky the leading lights. The goal of the Trotskyites, as demonstrated by the Comintern [Communist International], was to establish a permanent worldwide revolution “to fight by all available means, including armed force, for the overthrow of the international bourgeoisie and for the creation of an international Soviet Republic as a transition stage to the complete abolition of the state.”
By this definition, it was quite obvious that Trotsky and his cohorts were embarking upon a reckless and bloody adventure to establish a utopia based on nothing except their own fanciful dreams. To accomplish this, agents in every important country, usually citizens of those countries, either volunteered or were recruited to undermine the bourgeois government under which they currently lived and agitate for world revolution.
According to Burovsky, because Trotsky and a plethora of fellow Jews already held sway in the Soviet Union, many of their coreligionists in the free world both openly (when possible) and secretly (if not possible) admired the accomplishment of their fellow Jews and lent their services in the establishment of the proletarian utopia. Trotsky was idolized by a very large number of Jews on the left—an entirely mainstream movement among Jews at the time. This is an example of the Jewish guru phenomenon so characteristic of Jewish intellectual and political movements.
For Burovsky and many outsiders, the internal political wars within the Soviet Union seemed more like the falling out of a gang of thieves who had stolen the Russian Empire and who were now fighting over the spoils. And thieves they were. Having first hijacked the country and then looted the Russian banks and citizens of their wealth, Lenin, Trotsky, Radek, Kollontai, Dzerzhinsky, and a host of other non-Russians accumulated fortunes. Only Stalin refrained. Like Hitler, his future nemesis, Stalin lived quite modestly. The new Communist elite, on the other hand, lived exceedingly well, frequenting the elegant shops and government offices along Arbat Street, the Fifth Avenue of Moscow, where very few native Russians could afford to visit. These beneficiaries of the Communist Revolution are sometimes referred to as the “children of the Arbat.”
The theme of wealthy elite Jews under Soviet communism also occurs in Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century: “Slezkine describes the life of the largely Jewish elite in Moscow and Leningrad, where they attended the theater, sent their children to the best schools, had peasant women for nannies, spent weekends at pleasant dachas, and vacationed at the Black Sea” (see here, p. 88).
Stalin, aside from his determination to eliminate any possible threat to his sole leadership, also feared that the Trotskyite approach would endanger Communism by alerting the capitalist countries to the threat it represented. Instead, he thought it would be much more prudent to first establish communism in Russia, protect and nurture it, and during this incubation period build the most powerful armed forces in the world ready to pounce on and take the countries of Europe at the most opportune time, namely, when the capitalist states were exhausted from the inevitable next world war. He therefore sought to remove all Trotskyite-infected and other potentially dangerous elements from the Soviet State in a major purge before that war occurred. This, according to Professor Burovsky, was the main reason for Stalin’s Purge of 1937.
For Professor Burovsky the unending bitter political squabbles following the revolution were evidence that the Civil War waged between the White and Red Russians (1918–1922), between the former rulers and the usurpers, was simply followed by an internal civil war between communist internationalist intellectuals who viewed the whole world as their oyster (Trotsky, Bukharin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and the rest) and the more conservative, nationalistic Stalinists who favored stability. (For example, at a Party Conference in 1918, Zinoviev proclaimed: “We have to get 90 out of 100 million of the population of the Soviet Republic to follow us. Those left over have nothing for us. They will have to be liquidated.”)
To be sure, Jews were prominent in both factions, but Stalin insisted their loyalty be directed exclusively to his concept of a “socialist” Soviet Union while their own interests and unrealistic goals be set aside. When, in his eyes, they did not comply, he had them killed.
Burovsky describes how the crimes committed by the usurpers of power in Russia far exceeded anything known to date, including even the French Revolution. During the usurpation of power in the revolution, no fewer than two million met their death. In the continuing period of the internal civil war, Burovsky estimates, 9–13 million eventually lost their lives. Yet, the crimes of the Lenin-Trotsky faction were either glossed over or simply not mentioned in the press or on the radio, while the Western media concentrated on and exaggerated those committed by Stalin during the “Great Purge.” Whereas the French Revolution had pitted Frenchmen against Frenchmen, and the American Revolution, Englishmen against Englishmen, the so-called Russian Revolution was entirely different. This was a case of minorities, mostly Jews, in the Empire usurping power from the majority Russians and destroying previously existing Russian elites.
According to Burovsky, the Leninists and Trotskyites made no secret of their intent to create a new world on the ashes of the old. In their anthem, The Song of the Destroyers, they sing:
We shall burn everything, we shall destroy everything,
We shall wipe everything from the face of the Earth,
We shall extinguish the old Sun,
We shall ignite a new Sun. (p. 155)
Lenin and Trotsky, Burovsky maintains, invented and practiced genocide freely in what they termed the “zoological milieu”, i.e., the Russian people, ruthlessly murdering entire layers of Russian society. As soon as members of the former ruling class (high government officials, generals, intellectuals, clergy, etc.) were eliminated, their positions were filled with Jewish revolutionaries. The children of the former upper classes were forbidden to attend the best schools and universities; only the children of the revolutionaries were granted access. According to Jewish World, 1939, Jews, representing 1.8% of the total population, constituted 20% of the students in higher institutes of learning in the USSR in 1939.[4] (p. 230)
The destruction of Christian civilization was high on Lenin and Trotsky’s hit list. All displays of Christian belief were outlawed. Churches were first looted of their art treasures and then converted into warehouses, theaters, recreation centers, and worse. Priests, nuns, and all other officers of the Church were either murdered or sent to the GULAG. Celebrations of Christmas, Easter, and Holy Days were forbidden. The icon corner in most Russian homes was banned. Because Jews were prominent among the new rulers and enforcers, all acts of anti-Semitism were made punishable by death. In a speech Trotsky announced the unveiling of the first statue in the world of Judas Iscariot, a man, the Communist leader said, who understood that Christianity was a phony religion and had the courage to break the bonds that bound him to it. Similar statues appeared in other cities. The people, however, could not protest because of the laws against anti-Semitism.
Burovsky proceeds to describe how the revolutionaries tried to gradually replace the civilization achieved under the Orthodox Church and the Czars with something entirely alien to the native people. Under the Czars Russia gave the world Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and other giants of literature. By way of contrast, the Communist regime produced a bevy of poets and short story writers. Burovsky singles out Osip Mandelshtam, Yevgenia Ginzburg, and Isaak Babel, who lent their services to the new regime. Mandelshtam, who was a friend of Bukharin, had worked in the ministry of education of the new regime. Babel had actually served in the Jewish-dominated Cheka for many years and wrote almost autobiographically about his experiences in his stories. He was also the mentor of Ilya Ehrenburg, World War II’s most notorious propagandist. Both enjoyed life and indulged in the pleasures of the Arbat. Both were executed in Stalin’s 1937 counter-revolution. Burovsky and the mass of Russian people would maintain that they got what they deserved.
Under the Czars and the Orthodox Church Russia gave the world the paintings of Repin, Rublov, and other such immortals. The Communist regime, on the other hand, introduced abstract “art” produced by such worthies as Kandinsky, Malevich, Altman, Chagall, Shterenburg, and other such. Again, Stalin, like Hitler, preferred socialist realism in art. Whatever the objective merits of the works produced by the artists and literary figures in the early Soviet Union, they reflected the Jewish, not the Russian spirit.
Proceeding then to Stalin’s purge of the Red Army leadership and the NKVD, Burovsky finds much to be applauded. Although Generals Zhukov and Rokossovsky believed that Stalin’s purge had broken the spine of the Red Army and was responsible for the losses in the first years of World War II, Burovsky leans more to the views expressed by Viktor Suvorov in his book The Purge,[5] namely that the purge or cleansing actually improved the Red Army by removing toxic and incompetent elements. Moreover, Trotsky, as first head of the Army and Navy, had appointed many of the top military leaders. Obviously, Stalin considered them tainted and their loyalty to him questionable.[6]
Stalin purged the organs of State security (Cheka, NKVD), notoriously Jewish strongholds, with a particularly heavy and rough brush. According to Burovsky, about 20,000 members of these organs were purged, including almost all the leaders of the Dzerzhinski era: A. Kh. Artuzov, G. I. Boky, M. Ya. Latsis, M. S. Kedrov, V. N. Mantsev, G. S. Moroz, I. P. Pavlunovsky, Ya. Kh. Peters, M. A. Trilisser, I. S. Unshlikht, and V. V. Fomin. Of this Burovsky comments: “It would be difficult to imagine a more repulsive, criminal, and dangerous group of people.” (Diky, p. 240) Nikolai Yezhov, known to insiders as the “bloody dwarf” because he was only five feet tall, was commissar general of state security in charge of both the NKVD and the GRU. He was arrested in January 1939 and shot in April 1940.
As for the crimes attributed to and indeed committed by Stalin, author Burovsky contends that had any of his political adversaries achieved total power, the crime levels would have even been higher. After all, it was Lenin and Trotsky, not Stalin, who laid the cruel and bloody foundations of Communist rule in Russia. The secret police organization, the Cheka, the predecessor and model for the later NKVD and sister agencies, were established in December 1917, as was the GULAG. Literally, armies of secret police ensured that the GULAG would not want for slave labor. In 1919, at the onset of the Civil War (1917–1922) Trotsky was made Peoples Commissar of Army and Navy, head of the Red Army. For a decade in that and other high posts Trotsky was in a prime position to fill the armed forces and government with his own people, mostly Jews, often despite Stalin’s disapproval. During the same period Stalin by virtue of his position as Party Secretary, a less prominent but equally important position, had also been putting his own people in critical posts. In 1929, after Lenin’s death, Stalin finally succeeded in exiling Trotsky, but the shadow of his competitor for leadership lingered on in the persons and policies of the government. Thus, the Communist Party and state in the late 1930s still remained, as most objective observers noted, essentially Jewish.
For example, in 1937 almost without exception the plenipotentiaries (ambassadors) of the Soviet Union to the rest of the world were Jews: Maisky in England, Surits in France, Yurenev in Germany, Shtein in Italy, and Rubinin in Belgium. The Soviet Delegates to the League of Nations were with one exception Jews: Finkelshtein-Litvinov, Rozenberg, Shtein, Markus, Brenner, Girshfeld, Galfand, and Svanidze who was Georgian. Litvinov was also head of the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs. (Diky, p. 222)
At the time of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), the Soviet Ambassador was Marcel Rozenberg; the military attaché was Lvovich (pseudonym Loti). The Red Army officers commanding the international brigades were: Division Commander Lazar Shtein (Emil Kleber); other Jewish commanders were Grigori Shtein (Grigorovich), Corps CommanderYakov Smushkevich (Duglas), Red Army General Batkin (Fritz), and others. Abram Slutsky (Chernigovsky), head of the Soviet Foreign Intelligence Service, NKVD, also came and joined with resident NKVD agent General Aleksandr Orlov who supervised a private jail in Alkalade. (Diky, p. 223)
There were three million Jews living in the Soviet Union in 1939. By early 1941, following the division of Poland and pursuant to population-transfer provisions of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, there were 5.4 million Jews inside the USSR. Operation Barbarossa, the German attack on Russia occurred on 22 June 1941 when half the Jews in Poland were under the protection of the Red Army.
Burovsky notes that the end goal of both devils, Stalin and Trotsky, was the same — world communism, but the means chosen by Trotsky to achieve it would have caused worldwide mayhem and countless millions more deaths. It was not long after the purge that Stalin succeeded in having Trotsky himself murdered in 1940 in Mexico by which time war had already broken out in Europe. In the same year of 1940 the Anti-Comintern Pact was signed by a dozen nations with the statement,
....recognizing that the aim of the Communist International, known as the Comintern [Trotsky’s organization] is to disintegrate and subdue existing states by all means at its command; convinced that the toleration of interference by the Communist International in the internal affairs of the nations not only endangers their internal peace and social well-being, but is also a menace to the peace of the world desirous of co-operating in the defense against Communist subversive activities.
Countries signing the Pact were: Germany, Japan, China (Nanjing), Italy, Denmark, Finland, Spain, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Croatia, and Turkey.
The United States, Great Britain, and France abstained from and even objected to the Pact, believing (or saying they believed) Germany to be the greatest threat. The line between the Axis powers and the Western Allies in World War II was thereby drawn. It would take the West fifty years to correct this mistake.
Soon after World War II and the founding of the state of Israel, Stalin, following a policy of Russification and rejuvenation of the victorious Communist State, attempted once again to reduce the number and power of Jews in the Soviet Union. To this end, he planned another purge, one that would necessarily involve many of his old Jewish comrades. Before he could implement his plan, he was dead. Officially the Soviet leader was reported to have died a natural death, but many speculate that he was killed by the people he had planned to kill.[8]
The devil’s advocate, author Burovsky, rests his case in the defense of Stalin with the words:
...Of course Stalin’s regime was awful! But in politics it is very often necessary to choose, not between the good and the better, but between the bad and the worse. The alternatives to Stalin would have been even worse nightmares.…The entire history of the USSR may be seen as an attempt to establish a utopia, and the civil war {w}as the rejection of the utopia by the people.… Like Mandelshtam and Ginzburg, the “children of the Arbat” had not the slightest reason to repent; nor the slightest interest in whom they destroyed…. It is a pity that Stalin did not have another 10 years of life in which to say, like Napoleon, “ the revolution is over”, but we can be especially grateful that Stalin killed the revolutionary bastards, the foul-smelling fungi that accumulated on Arbat Street and that he prevented the fungus from spreading to the rest of Russia and the world. That which has gone down in history as “1937” was in fact the most brilliant and glorious event in the Stalin era. Farewell Comrade Stalin! Thank you! (Burovsky, pp. 280, 284–285)
The verdict for Stalin, according to Professor Burovsky, must be “not guilty” because of mitigating circumstances. The events and crimes so described and attributed to Stalin must be seen as simply ugly episodes of ongoing criminal violence perpetrated by one gangster against another.
Endnotes:
[1] “Glorious 1937!”, Zavtra, 9 September 1997. The Russian national
heroes are: General Aleksandr Suvorov, General Mikhail Kutuzov, Admiral
Pavel Nakhimov, and Admiral Fyodor Ushakov. The Knight in the Tiger’s
skin is Prince Tariel of India, from the famous Georgian poem
Vephkhviskhaosani.
[4] Andrei Diky. 200 Years Together: Jews in Russia and the USSR.
Algoritm Publishing, Moscow, 2010, 320 p.
[5] Suvorov uses the Russian word ischishchenie instead of the usual
chistka for “purge.” The former has more the meaning of “cleansing” or
the removal of toxic, dangerous elements; the later has more the meaning
of total housecleaning. Robert Conquest preferred to use the expression
The Great Terror rather than The Great Purge. Like so many of his
contemporaries at Oxford, Conquest himself joined the Communist Party in
“glorious 1937.”
[6] Dan Michaels. Stalin’s 1937 Purge of the Red Army. The Barnes
Review, No. 3, 2000, pp. 49-55.
[8] Dan Michaels [aka as Robert Logan]. Was Stalin Assassinated? The
Barnes Review, No.
4, 2003, pp. 35-40.
Peter Myers
381 Goodwood Rd
Childers Qld 4660
Australia