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.

WHO WERE STALIN’S VICTIMS?

(This is an unfinished entry, which, however, constitutes the third part of the triptych Tragedy And Statistics. The first two were posted together on February 7, 2011.)

“One death is a tragedy, one million deaths is just a statistic.”

And once again we are opening a third consecutive entry with the same spurious quotation, and once again, for a good reason. “Who were some of Stalin’s less obvious victims?” we have asked, and let us begin with those hapless innocents who happen to be the collateral damage in any police action conducted on a massive scale. Their suffering and death are a tragic blight on Russia’s national soul, and their fate decries the motives and actions of each single individual directly or indirectly responsible for each miscarriage of justice that could result in such a tragedy.

It will be a grave mistake, however, to assume that millions of Russian innocents had been destroyed for a frivolous reason, or else, preventively, without any reason. Such an impression will be utterly inconsistent with the most basic rationale of all genuinely totalitarian societies. Presumably, every loyal citizen of a totalitarian state is protected by the state as its most valued possession. If an envious neighbor of mine denounces me to the state because he dislikes me or covets my wife, both of us will be thoroughly investigated, and the chances are that he will be repressed for the false report, and that I will go on unmolested, unless I myself do have a stinking skeleton in the closet.

One of the most common type of denunciation, resulting in the arrest and repression of the denounced, used to pertain to the countless cases of adultery, which was considered a serious crime against the Soviet State, undermining the basic Soviet family unit, and thus the very foundation of Soviet society, thereby tantamount to treason. Hundreds of thousands of otherwise blameless Soviet citizens were sent to the gulags for this all too common human transgression, and I somehow understand how they may have felt that they were treated unjustly, and even criminally. Apparently the cold logic of totalitarian justice was incomprehensible to them and in that case society was punishing them first and foremost as pariahs, incompatible with its basic rules of civil conduct.

Another type of transgressor was the easy loafer, the laidback underachiever, who was judged as not giving a 120% effort for the greater glory of the state and the nation. This type of denunciation was hard to repel for all those who were not literally burning themselves out in the workplace, and thus many innocents were repressed merely for lacking the necessary energy and enthusiasm in performing their civic duty…

These were just a few types of punishable transgressions, which may seem minor to the modern critic, but do let us keep in mind that those late 1930’s in Soviet Russia were not some kind of heyday of arbitrary justice run amok. The country was deep in the realization of an imminent apocalyptic war with the German superpower, and, consequently, the law of the land was virtually, and understandably, substituted by a full-blown martial law…

(To be continued at a later time…)

MY FATHER’S VERSION OF HISTORY. PART II.

…Equally non-existent in his published memoirs are Artem’s Cuban exploits, which put a totally different face on the story of Fidel Castro’s Cuba. There are all-too-many other such unfortunate examples of omissions. Besides, there is never any mention of the historically significant, and often earthshaking stories imparted to Artem by his eyewitness friends. Fortunately, every such story known to me but missing from his published memoirs finds a place among my papers, and thus it will not be irretrievably lost to the historical knowledge of the future.

Generally speaking, the biggest shortcoming of my father’s version of history is his failure to put the giants of Soviet and world history, such as Stalin, first and foremost, as well as so many others, with whom he had close personal contact throughout his life, in a world-historical context. He prefers to see them at a country house or at some other private location, but never in reference to the times and historical events, when they occur. Once again, this deficiency is fully compensated by my own historical account, which emphasizes the very things that are missing in my father’s.

Thus, comparing my version of history with his, the reader will find out that they do not conflict most of the time, as Artem prefers to ignore the things that I usually focus on. In other instances, they virtually coincide, and wherever there is a discrepancy, I am convinced that the reader will accept my account as more truthful and logical. A good example is my father’s attitude to Vasili Stalin. In my account, Artem cannot forgive his “brother” the incident when he either recklessly-accidentally or with a malicious premeditation shot Stalin in the shoulder. In Artem’s account, the air rifle, left loaded and unattended, accidentally shoots by itself.

I am not inclined to comment on this much further as the reader can easily guess which of the two stories is more credible on their intrinsic merits or demerits. The only question is why would he do that. The answer is obvious. He is loathe to speak ill not just of Stalin, but of Stalin’s whole family too, whether they deserve it or not.

Incidentally, this story of Vasili Stalin’s air rifle has an illuminating follow-up. On hearing the shot, several people rushed into the room, and Stalin’s doctor was summoned right away. But before allowing the doctor to attend to his wound, Stalin coldly suggested that Vasili be immediately and properly re-educated on how to handle an air rifle, whether loaded or not. To be sure, the lesson was conducted in front of Stalin, just as the doctor was doing his job on him.

Lastly, I obviously know for a fact that Artem did maintain direct contacts with Khrushchev, and, after him, with Brezhnev. Yet, in his interviews he chooses to produce an impression to the contrary, doing this with a rather skillful ambiguity, at that. “They did not know me,” he says, subtly suggesting his deepest disdain for Stalin’s inferior successors, and leaving a gaping double entendre for the reader- nutcracker to crack.

MY FATHER’S VERSION OF HISTORY. PART I.

[This entry could not possibly be written without my father going public in Russia with his firsthand historical reminiscences, published during the first decade of the new millennium. Needless to say, his main focus has always been Stalin, and the two of his most important books are titled appropriately: I Remember Stalin and Conversations About Stalin (co-authored with his journalistic interviewer Ekaterina Glushik). However, his earliest published work, in 2003, was a collection of four stories Tales of an Artillerist, based on his personal experience in Russia’s Great Patriotic War against Germany. Ironically, these stories were written by him as early as half-a-century before their publication, and I read them all back in 1967 in exactly the same form as they were printed thirty-six years later. (No editing was done for the publication.) To sum it up, my father was made a member of the Russian Writers’ Organization, and deservedly so. The only question can be asked, why was it done after so many years, during the last five years of his life, and not before?…

In so far as my father’s published writings are concerned, I intend to use the most interesting parts of them in this and in later sections of this book, and perhaps a few years down the road I will find the time to direct my effort toward a good translation of his published works from Russian into English, with extensive comments on my part. Alas, I have no time to do it right away, since my work on my own material is still very much in progress, and it is bound to consume all my time for several years to come.]

Before I move on with my peculiar version of history, I must first discuss what I call “my father’s version of history.” It goes without saying that my father General Artem Fedorovich Sergeev-Artem belongs to a very special club counting very few people who have the right to their own version of history. Furthermore, my father’s credentials in this club beat mine hands down. Yet, between the two of us, my presentation of world history (albeit secondhand) beats his (albeit firsthand), and even worse, his is virtually invisible, except for a handful of declarative points, such as to reiterate at every opportunity that Comrade Stalin was a great man.

My father was indeed a devoted Stalinist as much as he was a Russian patriot, as for him, just as for Stalin, the name Stalin was not the name of the man, but a symbol of Russia’s historical glory. Unfortunately, in terms of his historical approach, my father was a narrow antiquarian, apparently, with no interest in monumentals. I, on the other hand, see monumental history as the highest form of history, and I use the antiquarian’s lens only as a tool of studying my clay, from which the monumentality arises, up close, like a sculptor. (See my entry Antiquarian Of The Monumental, posted on this blog on July 22, 2013.)

Because of my father’s deliberate choice of narrow antiquarianism, he is extremely reluctant to generalize or to put things in a broad historical perspective. He is quite satisfied to deliver his earthshaking history in a small and unassuming manner. One may find certain merit in his approach (I want to stick to the basic facts of my immediate experience, and let others generalize as much as they like!), but I find it objectionable, as the more merit and value your historical material possesses, the more compunction you must feel toward the prospect of leaving it to others, rather than yourself, to make their own conclusions and generalizations, which will almost certainly be incompetent, misconstrued, and otherwise insidious.

There is another huge and most regrettable historical deficiency in my father’s published memoirs: He picks and chooses material from the warehouse of his memory, quite disingenuously at that. There are layers upon layers of priceless historical knowledge, which he is not going to touch at all. For instance, his direct involvement with the greatest mystery-woman of the twentieth century, La Passionaria, his mother-in-law, is completely off-limits, which is a terrible loss. Very disingenuously and, to put it mildly, untruthfully, he claims that he had no personal contacts with Stalin after the end of WWII, which objectively and logically cannot be true, as his direct involvement in Stalin’s postwar plan to install Dolores Ibarruri as the president of Spain, and thus to establish Soviet control over Spain via her son-in-law, that is, Artem, could not be done without Stalin’s direct interaction with his adoptive son. Had Artem’s connection to Ibarruri been revealed by him in his memoirs, any perceptive reader would have questioned his assertion about his and Stalin’s lack of personal communication at exactly the time when Stalin’s Spanish Card was being played out…

(This is the end of Part I. Part II will be posted tomorrow.)

“COMRADE STALIN.”

I am being asked why I am often referring to Stalin as “Comrade Stalin,” and I find that it may be advisable to explain this to the reader of this blog.

To begin with, rest assured, my good reader, that there is nothing personal in calling Stalin “Comrade Stalin.” He was born in Tiflis Gubernia (part of Gruzia/Georgia, which was administratively part of the Caucasus Namestnichestvo/Viceroyalty) of the Russian Empire. His real (but naturally Russified) name was Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili.

Having become a revolutionary, he adopted for himself several noms de guerre, which was usual practice in the revolutionary circles. Among these two particular pseudonyms were to become famous. His earlier such name (since 1903) was “Koba,” which emphasized his Georgian roots and was suitable for his activities as a regional figure. Although initially he was rather fond of it, by the time he had become a national (that is, all-Russian) figure, he clearly needed an all-Russian sounding name. That is why, after 1912, he started signing his name and calling himself Stalin. In accordance with the Bolshevik Party discipline, his comrades were now to call him “Comrade Stalin.”

However, many of his revolutionary comrades, both before and after 1917, kept calling him Koba, trying to emphasize their long-term connection since the pre-Stalin days. It was a sign of familiarity, which Stalin did not appreciate, and most of his “Koba-callers” did not survive the purges of 1936-1938. The same cannot be said of those, like Molotov, Voroshilov, Mikoyan, and others, who knew their distance, and called him by the respectful name “Comrade Stalin.”

It is obvious that for the sake of slogan brevity he was called Stalin in such set phrases as ‘Lenin and Stalin’ and in countless others including the Soviet national anthem (“Stalin raised us”) and the celebrated rallying cry of World War II (“For Motherland, for Stalin,-- Forward!!!”). Yet his official nom de guerre as well as the proper form of address was, I repeat, Comrade Stalin.

It is for this reason, and in order to register this notable historical point with the reader, that I am frequently referring to Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili/Koba/Stalin as “Comrade Stalin.”

CHRONOLOGICAL REFERENCE LIST FOR THE HISTORY ENTRIES. PART II.

(I have this list on my blog now as the best way out of the serious predicament caused by sporadic postings of historical entries, to the detriment of chronological continuity.)

Lenin And Rosa: Who Owned Karl Marx? Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg. 1918-1921. Posted on February 1^st, 2011.

Lenin’s Testament. Lenin. 1922-1923. Posted on February 2^nd, 2011.

Trotsky: Big Joke! Trotsky. 1905-1940. Posted on February 3^rd, 2011.

Was Trotsky A Menshevik? Trotsky. 1905-1940. Posted on March 21^st, 2012.

The Favorite Of The Entire Party. Bukharin. 1910-1938. Posted on February 4^th, 2011.

Three Sources Of Stalin’s Power. Stalin. 1903-1922. Posted on February 5^th, 2011.

Generalissimus. Stalin. 1941-1945. Posted on February 6^th, 2011.

Tragedy And Statistics. Stalin. 1922-1953. Posted on February 7^th, 2011.

Stalin’s Cruelty. Stalin. 1922-1953. Posted on February 7^th,2011, as part of Tragedy And Statistics.

Golodomor. Stalin. 1932-1933. Posted on February 8^th, 2011.

Stalin As Royalty. Stalin. 1922-1953. Posted on July 17^th-18^th, 2013.

Fear Means Respect. Stalin. 1922-1953. Posted on July 19^th, 2013.

Stalin As The Philosopher King. Stalin. 1922-1953. Posted on July 21^st, 2013.

Stalin The Priest. Stalin. 1922-1953. Posted on February 13^th, 2011.

Stalin In Bayreuth. Stalin. 1922-1953. Posted on February 10^th, 2011.

Kalinin: Moron, Monster, Genius, Saint. Kalinin. 1875-1946. Posted on February 19^th-20^th, 2013.

Maxim Litvinov As Stalin’s Jewish Card. Stalin, Litvinov. 1930-1945. Posted on February 25^th, 2013.

Stalin Reads Mein Kampf. Stalin, Hitler. 1923-1927. Posted on February 13^th, 2011.

Preparing For War. Stalin. 1927-1941. Posted on February 14^th, 2011.

THE TWENTY-SEVENTH COMMISSAR. PART III OF 3.

…The rest of the story is by no means predictable. When a fairly undistinguished youngster is thus entrusted with an explosive assignment, like this one, it can mean only one thing: if he fails, he was expendable; if he succeeds, he will be worth more dead than alive.

Mikoyan’s only chance of survival now depended on a combination of his personal skillfulness and sheer luck in two equally perilous stages of his game: the assignment, and its aftermath.

In the assignment part, he would have to rely very heavily on his close associate Beria, who had established himself in Baku virtually openly, as a British collaborator. Providing the British authorities with Mikoyan’s secret information about the identities of the Soviet leaders in Baku, preparing to board a ship to flee Baku, would be Beria’s windfall. (It was by no means his downfall, though, although the main formal accusation against Beria in 1953 was indeed that he had been a British agent, and specifically, his betrayal of the twenty-six Commissars of Baku.) Mikoyan of course would have to be arrested with the others, or otherwise the suspicion that he had been the informer would have fallen on him right away. Whether his arranged release from jail would succeed or not, was by no means a foregone conclusion, and Comrade Mikoyan must have experienced some truly nerve-racking moments in that British captivity. But, having made all the necessary plans through Beria, Mikoyan could at least expect that he would not be double-crossed by Lenin, because Beria was Mikoyan’s personal operative, not sanctioned by his unreliable Moscow boss.

To make a long story short, having received his memorable assignment, Mikoyan resurfaced in the oily city of Baku on the shores of the Caspian Sea and soon---what do you know!----Lenin's dream was coming true. There are several conflicting versions of this murky historic event, but the bottom line has always been the same: the twenty-six top leaders of the Soviet organization in Transcaucasia were all apprehended, promptly tried, and shot. Mikoyan was also arrested with them, but unlike the others, he was not shot, and fairly soon, under obscure circumstances, he found himself at liberty. After which, he successfully reached Moscow, via the Civil War-torn South, unmolested and unscathed.

Having survived Stage One, Mikoyan was facing the no less formidable jeopardy of having become a man who knew too much. His task was now to find for himself a second lease on usefulness. In a bold stroke of genius, Mikoyan approached Comrade Stalin, spilled all the beans, rolled over, and offered the Wonderful Georgian his soft underbelly: do with me whatever you want. It goes without saying that in the process of this extraordinary confession, Mikoyan delivered to Stalin his priceless inside information on the roles of Lenin and Beria in this incredible, but hardly inscrutable affair.

Stalin, of course, appreciated people who recognized him as their boss, and who offered him wholehearted commitment of personal loyalty: no games, no negotiations, no second thoughts. (Even more so he appreciated such loyalists, like Mikoyan now, who pledged their allegiance to him by exposing the softest portions of their soft underbellies, thus burning all their bridges behind them.) There was no doubt that, after all said and done, Lenin would have much preferred Mikoyan completely out of the picture. But Mikoyan was now a member of the legendary Stalin Brigade, and under Stalin’s personal protection. If the gray hair of his old age, and the post of President of the USSR, in later years can speak for him retrospectively, throwing his lot with Stalin, back in 1919, Mikoyan had made the right choice.