Russian Jews Between the Reds and the Whites, 1917-1920. Oleg Budnitskii
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fishermen, were likewise such magnificent flowers of spirit, and they confirmed that the Christian religion on earth was the religion of the international brotherhood of the people, a religion in whose soil the ideas of socialism and the international took root.”127
Dimanshtein's disapproval of Gorky's pamphlet probably had more to do with Gorky secretly protecting Zionists and attempting to denounce their persecutors (i.e., Jewish communists), as M. Agurskii and M. Shklovskaia have argued. As Gorky once wrote, “Like you, the Jews have factions that are hostile to one another: the Jewish Zionists want to resettle in Palestine, where they have founded a government; while others are against this and attack the Zionists, closing their schools and synagogues, and outlawing the teaching of the Jewish language to their children. Jews are just as much a fragmented people as we Russians are.”128 There are, of course, several errors in Gorky's claims. The Jewish state in Palestine was yet to be founded, and there weren't any “Zionist” synagogues; at the time Zionism was still mostly a secular movement. Still, it is clear where Gorky's sympathies lay.
The Bolshevik leadership was well aware of the antisemitic attitudes that were widespread throughout the population at large, workers and peasants included. The military censors in charge of opening and checking mail would often run across statements to the effect that no one wanted to go to war, and that “it isn't worth fighting for the Soviet and the Jews” (Volkhov, Orel gubernia, June 3, 1919). Another correspondent complained about the effectiveness of some of the Jewish Communists in Tver. At an event billed as a “Congress of Soviets,” the brilliant Moscow orator Sosnovskii had managed to push through a resolution declaring that war must be waged until the Bolsheviks were victorious (this was no small feat, given the antiwar sentiment in most regions). After the resolution, however, “the Yids started up again, and everyone hung their heads in disappointment” (Tver, June 26, 1919). A Red Army soldier from the Kaluga gubernia complained that all of the deserters had gone home, and that they were angry at him for “serving Jewish power and selling his own skin” (June 25, 1919). Yet another letter from Nizhnedneprovsk claimed that “the workers are saying that they don't want to protect this Jewish [zhidovskoe] government anymore” (June 1, 1919). A Red Army soldier wrote home, “I curse this government, and wish that it would collapse, the sooner the better. Then I wouldn't have to serve those Yids, I could serve my own God. Down with the lot of them.”129
An inhabitant of Kiev reported that much of the population did not support the Soviet government, and quite reasonably pointed out that “the large number of Jews [among the Bolsheviks] provides an excellent argument against Soviet authority” (June 12, 1919).130 The Bolsheviks themselves were well aware of this problem. In May of 1919, a communist named Federchuk wrote to G. I. Petrovskii with the following request: “send respectable, balanced people who are able to gain the trust of the masses to do the agitation work. Then the peasants won't be able to latch on to Grigoriev's slogan: ‘Instead of land, they gave you the Cheka, and instead of freedom, they gave you commissars from among those who crucified Christ.’”131 It was not clear where such “respectable” people were to come from, especially as it was imperative that they be completely loyal to Soviet power. With Jews, one could be sure of at least one thing: they had no other choice but to side with the Soviets.
It should be noted that the “large number of Jews” was only one of many reasons people disliked the Soviet authorities. Ignorant of the fact that their mail was being read carefully by military censors, many people wrote quite openly on a number of other objections they had. Some of these were much more important than the ethnic make-up of the Party: corruption, persecution of the church, and a collapse in general morality were all important, not to mention the forced requisitions and mobilizations which often pitted brother against brother. Some accused the Jews of avoiding military service (“The Yid needs to fight, but he's not around. Ten of the Yids from the Tailors' Union have left, while all our Russians fight. We should beat them all, down to the very last Yid. Those speculators don't have anything to fear, while we're afraid of everything” [Livna, Orel gubernia, June 30, 1919]). But people were even more disturbed by communists who did not join the army: “The communists are all deserters. When they were allowed to rob the peasants they were all communists, but when they get to the front, they all run away” (Smolensk, undated); “Some of the comrades had come into the Party as wolves in sheep's clothing, but as soon as they heard the communists were being mobilized they made like bees and flew from the hive” (Oboian', Kursk gubernia, July 25, 1919), etc.132
This is not to say that such sentiments were unique to those living under the Reds. The civilian population in White territories was just as likely to take issue with their living conditions, if not more so. They faced the same forced requisitions and confiscations, the same atrocities carried out on prisoners and the families of Red Army soldiers, the same public executions and punishments and so on. Often the disillusionment there was even more bitter, as many had expected the Whites to restore law and order (“Never would I have imagined that Denikin's army would engage in robbery. It wasn't just the soldiers, but the officers too. If I had known how the White victors would behave themselves, I would have hidden the linens and the clothes. Now there's nothing left” [Orel, November 17, 1919]). Rather than citing the numerous descriptions of robberies and violence that took place under the Whites, I will limit myself to an excerpt from a letter that best demonstrates why the majority of the population supported the Reds in the end: “You had everything under the Whites, but you were always under the whip [pod nagaikoi]. Let the White Army be damned. We've managed to wait for our comrades, and now at
least we live in freedom” (Vereshchagino, Viatka gubernia, August 8, 1919).133
A number of Jews served in the terror organization known as the Cheka and it is widely accepted that Jews comprised a disproportionate number of its operatives. Leonard Schapiro wrote, for example, that “anyone who had the misfortune to fall into the hands of the Cheka stood a very good chance of finding himself confronted with and possibly shot by a Jewish investigator.”134 Zvi Gitelman has also claimed that serving in the Cheka was particularly popular with the Jewish population. He argues that the authorities found the Jews to be extremely reliable, as they had no connection to the old regime and were fervent enemies of the Whites. Moreover, Gitelman notes that some Jews joined the Cheka out of a desire to avenge crimes committed against the Jews by anti-Soviet forces, and by personal quests for power.135
Both historians and memoirists, however, have largely relied on opinions, and not on material facts.136 At the given moment, the only article to have examined the precise number of Jews working for the Cheka and the OGPU (the State Political Directorate) according to the rosters of the Bolshevik Central Committee is L. Krichevskii's “Jews in the Administration of the Cheka-GPU in the 1920s.”137 For this study, we are only concerned with the numbers for the Civil War period. According to the September 1918 count of those employed at Soviet institutions in Moscow, there were 781 workers in the central administration. As of September 25, 1918 there were 278 Latvians, 49 Poles, and 29 Jews. In other words, Jews composed 3.7 percent of those employed. Among the senior officials of the Cheka there were 119 Latvians, 19 Poles, and 19 Jews (8.6 percent). Of the 70 commissars of the Cheka, 38 were Latvian, 22 Russian, 7 Poles, and 3 Jews (4.3 percent). There were 8 Jews (19.1 percent) among the 42 interrogators and deputy interrogators, whereas 14 were Latvian, 13 were Russian, and 7 were Jews. Notably, in the Section for Combating Counterrevolution, which was the most significant section of the Cheka, the six Jews constituted 50 percent of the interrogators.138
In June–July of 1920, there were 1,805 individuals working in 32 gubernias for the “secret sections” of the Cheka. Of these 1,357 were Russian (75.2 percent), 137 were Latvian (7.6 percent), 102 were Jewish (5.6 percent), and 34 were Polish (I.9 percent), with other nationalities represented in significantly smaller numbers.139 By the end of the Civil War (i.e., late 1920), there were more than 50,000 people working for the Cheka at the gubernia level. Of these 77.3 percent were Russian, 9.1 percent were