THE RIGHTEOUS GENTILE

Among the many accusations thrown at Stalin by his critics, none is as offensive and contrary to fact than his customary depiction as the scourge of the Jews on a massive scale, and as a rabid anti-Semite in private life. This particular charge is an incredible disservice to history as well, because it conceals one of the most salient points in Jewish history and distorts the specific reasons behind Stalin’s mass persecutions of Soviet citizens, and what is widely known as his Great Purges.

There was just one occurrence in Stalin’s thirty years in power when Jews were targeted by him as Jews, but even in that case he was moved by strictly real-political motives, and the level of “punishment,” inflicted on innocent Jews was very mild. Let us take the situation with Maxim Litvinov, as a case in point.

Maxim Maximovich Litvinov (1876-1951), born Meir Henoch Moishevich Wallach-Finkelstein, was perhaps the pre-eminent Soviet diplomat of the pre-cold war era. As an ardent Bolshevik, his credentials with Lenin were illustrious, which allowed him more latitude than others were generally given. Having spent much of his pre-Revolution exile in England, he had an English wife (in fact, she was as 100% Jewish, as he himself was), which did not hurt his rise in the ranks of the Soviet establishment, but, on the contrary, seemed to make him indispensable in negotiating with the British in the difficult early years of Soviet diplomacy. He ended up appointed by Stalin, in 1930, to the post of Russia’s foreign minister, Narkomindel, in which position he served until 1939, when he was succeeded by Molotov ipse, for the reason that Molotov, an ethnic Russian, was seen as more appropriate to negotiate the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939 with the rabidly anti-Semitic Nazis. (The supreme irony of this fact was, of course, that Molotov’s wife Polina/Perla Zhemchuzhina was herself as Yiddish as they come, but for some reason, Stalin believed that in the eyes of the German Nazis that was not supposed to matter!) Thus, here was the most important instance of a Soviet official’s removal from his high office solely on account of his Jewishness, yet we must quickly add that in just two years, right after the Germans had broken the shaky peace and invaded the USSR in June 1941, Litvinov was instantly appointed Soviet Ambassador to the United States, succeeded by Gromyko in 1943, and from 1943 until his retirement in 1946 he served as Deputy Narkomindel to Molotov.

It is true that the big bad wolf of the Great Purges of the 1930’s was, indeed, labeled rather presumptuously the Trotsky-Zinoviev-Kamenev Bloc, after the three most prominent Jews of the early Soviet Government, and that, indeed, Stalin’s ploy here was, partially, to convince Hitler that Russia was on its way to purge the “Zionist Bolshevik” peril from the Government. But, other than that, nobody was ever persecuted under the pretext of belonging to this bloc on account of their Jewishness, although this association was often played facetiously to provide a common public face to a variety of actual crimes, whose nature was preferred to be kept secret.

Another famous example of Stalin “persecuting a Jew” was the case of Alexei Kapler, the Soviet filmmaker, who started having a sexual relationship with Stalin’s promiscuous daughter Svetlana when she was still an audacious fifteen-year-old, and he was twenty-three (!!!) years her senior. I do not know what this Comrade Kapler had been thinking, but I see nothing wrong in Stalin’s punishment of him by sending this most unwise man to the camps (on the charge of being a ‘British spy,’ which was just another case of concealing the real crime [of corrupting an underage person] under this phony façade). Needless to say, Kapler’s being Jewish did not make his crime of fooling around with the little precocious Svetlana any more offensive than it already was.

I could go on and on, but the bottom line of Stalin’s attitude to the Jews (and non-Jews, for that matter) was that he actually did not care about one’s ethnicity, as long as one was a faithful servant of the Soviet State, but none who showed disloyalty could count on any such thing as correct ethnicity, as opposed to incorrect one.

But there is a real bombshell about the question of Stalin and the Jews, which is recognized by every Jew who has lived through the Holocaust years, and by every observant Jew in Russia, Europe, and Israel, where this memory has become a part of the religious service. While American Jews in particular, constantly vilify Stalin as a persecutor of the Jews (at the same time as these same American Jews saw nothing wrong in the public displays of the portraits of Bogdan Khmelnitsky in Mr. Yushchenko’s pro-American Ukraine, where this cruel wholesale exterminator of the Jews, this perpetrator of the horrific seventeenth century Holocaust, which massacred proportionately more Jews than the Nazi Holocaust of the twentieth century, was celebrated as Ukraine’s greatest national hero!), the objective fact remains that as a result of relocating Eastward some two million Polish, Ukrainian, and Belorussian Jews in less than two years, between the 1939 Hitler-Stalin Pact (in which the Russians annexed Eastern Poland, and some other territories, thickly populated by Jews) and the German invasion of Russia in 1941, Stalin is, thus, credited with saving more Jewish lives than any other person, Jewish or non-Jewish, in the history of the world. Such is this great secret, shared by millions, that Stalin was and remains, together with Napoleon, a bona fide righteous gentile of the highest caliber, in the eyes of the history-conscious Jews!

Ironically, at the very same time, the same Russian, European, and Israeli Jews hold a very different view of the role played by the United States and Great Britain in the Nazi Holocaust of World War II… but this will be the subject of a separate entry, which follows next.