North American Committee Against Zionism and Imperialism
(NACAZAI)

Just how "Jewish" is Jewish Communism?

Muhammad Abu Nasr, Editorial Board of the Free Arab Voice

As you know, on 22 June 1941 Hitler sent his armies
into the Soviet Union on the pretext that he needed to
destroy "Jewish Communism." He also wanted vast
spaces to colonize and exploit, but the ideological
banner of fighting "Jewish Communism" as he called it
is still being waved by the rightists today.

So how "Jewish" was Soviet Communism anyway.

You will frequently see lists purporting to show that
a majority of the members of Lenin's first government
were Jews. Those lists are not by any means perfect.
They usually include numerous Mensheviks and others
who weren't even in Lenin's government.

But it is well known that the makeup of the Soviet
leadership changed in ensuing years and that a number
of Soviet leaders of Jewish background - Trotsky,
Kamenev, Zinoviev, and Bukharin, most prominently -
were expelled from the party in the 1920s and 1930s.

So by the time that Hitler invaded the USSR there was
only one individual of Jewish origin in the
Politbureau of the Central Committee of the Sovet
Communist Party, namely Lazar Moiseyevich Kaganovich
(1893-1991). Kaganovich, by the way, has a reputation
of having been hated by Zionists because he hated
them. A shoe repairman by profession, he joined the
Bolshevik party in 1911, that is long before the
October Revolution at a time when many Jews who later
wound up in the Bolshevik party were Bundists or
Mensheviks.

Anyway out of the whole Politbureau in 1941 there was
one man of Jewish origin.

But what of the Party as a whole?

According to the Soviet archives, as of 1 January 1941
there were 3,872,465 members of the Communist Party of
the Soviet Union. Of them 176,884 were Jews. In
other words about 4.6 percent of the Communist Party
were Jews in 1941.

After the war, on 1 January 1946, there were 5,513,649
members of the Soviet Communist Party. Of them
202,878 were Jews - or about 3.7 percent of the total.

(Source: Russian archive document [RTsKhIDNI, f. 17,
op. 117, d. 611, l. 40.] quoted in "Out of the Red
Shadows: anti-Semitism in Stalin's Russia," by Gennadi
Kostyrchenko, Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1995, p.
56.)

So when Hitler's armies invaded the Soviet Union to
destroy "Jewish Communism," Jews made up less than 5
percent of the members of the Soviet Communist Party
and had only one man in the top leadership of the
country. After the war the percentage of Jews in the
Communist Party was down to under 4 percent.

No doubt Jews in the Communist Party tried to be
active and influential beyond their numbers. But as
they made up a small percentage of members and a small
percentage of the leaders, their influence there must
have been far less significant than it was in other
countries at the same time. To speak of "Jewish
Communism" therefore was, to say the least, highly
misleading.