Inheritors of Terror

The Stalinist roots of Left antisemitism

The Left shows its true colors…

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Note: In November 2023, when the antisemitism of the progressive Left in America was spreading across the country like a gigantic toxic spill in the wake of the 10/7 Hamas pogrom, I wrote this article in an attempt to expose its historical roots. Rereading it now, I find that it’s serviceable as a counterblast against the truly despicable article that appeared on April 18 in The New York Times. Written by David French and three others, it equated the Trump Administration’s deportation policy with Stalin’s Great Purge. This mutilation of history is even worse than all those boringly familiar Trump/Hitler comparisons—it’s a Great Lie comparable to that which underpinned the Soviet state.

The op-ed was drawn to my attention by Liza Libes, whose own comment on it is well worth reading.

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Why are groups like the Democratic Socialists of America, Black Lives Matter, Human Rights Watch, etc. so deeply infected with antisemitism? How do people who consider themselves enlightened and progressive rationalize their celebrations of terrorism, their demands for genocide, their embrace of the world’s oldest form of racist hate?

Often the finger is pointed at the radical relativism and racially tainted discourse of postmodern progressivism. And though there’s something to that explanation, I’ve never been satisfied with it. In and of itself, the postmodern sensibility didn’t explain, for instance, why BLM’s immediate reaction to the bloody Hamas pogrom in Israel on October 7-8 was an outburst of Jew hatred. But then I recalled that the founders of Black Lives Matter are self-described “trained Marxists.” And there was the missing puzzle piece. Antisemitism was latent in Marxism-Leninism from the beginning, and to this day it persists on the Left.

You may remember that progressives excoriated Donald Trump when in 2017, he phoned Vladimir Putin to congratulate the Russian dictator on his victory in a bogus election. This was, of course, a tempest in a samovar. Barack Obama had done as much in 2012. And The Greatest President Who Absolutely Ever Was also congratulated Islamofascist and antisemitic head case Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on his election as president of Iran.

Their failure to note BHO’s penchant for sucking up to foreign despots was characteristic of the comrades: selective, if not positively hypocritical. Progressives of a certain age who now profess to see in V. Putin’s ramshackle regime an existential threat to Truth, Justice (but not the American Way, which they deplore) spent the halcyon days of their youth carrying the Kremlin’s water, for instance promoting the nuclear freeze while denouncing “American imperialism.” But historical amnesia is the heredity defect of the Left. Farther back in time, an earlier generation of progressives and leftists queued up to tongue-polish the jackboots of Comrade Stalin—who, they professed to believe, was “building socialism” in Russia, signposting the path to the Radiant Future.

Progressives become quite testy when those days are mentioned. They’ve shoved it all down the memory hole—and oh, how they wish that the rest of us would do likewise. Indeed, the desire and the necessity of forgetfulness are as important to them as it was to J.V. Stalin himself, for whom history was a manufactured fable, a wad of Silly Putty to be pounded into whatever shape the needs of the moment might demand.

And the Kremlin Mountaineer’s attitude toward history is understandable. The historical record was flattering neither to him nor to the regime that he fashioned in his own image. Among other malignant features, it reflected not only the structural antisemitism of “scientific socialism” but Stalin’s personal hatred of the Jews.

The October Revolution, as history designates the Bolshevik seizure of power and the foundation of the Soviet state, is something of a misnomer. In 1917, Russia still observed the Old Style (Julian) calendar, by which Lenin’s coup occurred on 25 October 1917—7 November 1917 by the Gregorian calendar now in use. That the October Revolution actually occurred in November and was not a revolution but a coup seems fitting, for the falsification of history was to become a principal prop of the regime’s power. The brutal honesty of its early days—the frank acknowledgment that the objective of the Red Terror was the destruction of actual “class enemies”—soon gave way to the Orwellian night and fog of the Stalin era, so ably chronicled in Robert Conquest’s magus opus, The Great Terror.

Stalin was history’s greatest mythmaker. Consider this fact, difficult to grasp but nevertheless true: Hardly any of the victims of the Stalinist purges were guilty of the crimes with which they were charged. The various conspiracies that the NKVD “unmasked”—concerning the Kirov murder, concerning the Red Army leadership’s coup plotting, concerning the treasonous “Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites”—were entirely fictional, formulated by the NKVD itself under Stalin’s supervision. Hundreds of thousands of people were arrested, brutally interrogated to make them confess, brought before kangaroo courts, condemned, and subjected to the “supreme measure”: a bullet to the back of the head. Millions more were consigned to labor camps in the USSR’s Arctic marches, with long sentences that many did not survive. And all that terror was grounded in a lie.

It’s true that as the purges went on, many genuinely guilty men found themselves on the wrong side of Stalinist “justice.” Genrikh Yagoda, the NKVD chief who engineered the 1934 assassination of Sergey Kirov as an overture to the Great Purge, found himself purged in his turn when the Boss decided that it was time to eliminate inconvenient witnesses. And in a characteristic twist, much of the testimony he gave at his 1938 trial was true. Yagoda had, indeed, organized the assassination of Kirov—though not, as the prosecution alleged, on behalf of a Trotskyite conspiracy but at Stalin’s own behest. No matter! Like so many others Yagoda was convicted, sentenced to death and shot.

Numerous other Party leaders, men with considerable blood on their hands like Nikolai Bukharin, met a similar fate. That such brutal oppressors of the masses followed their countless victims to the execution cellars may seem like rough-and-ready justice. But there was another casualty, truth itself, whose demise was to prove fatal for the regime that Lenin established, and Stalin perfected.

Once the Great Purge had run its course, the Party’s principal task became the maintenance of the Great Lie. A conspiracy of silence descended upon the Soviet Union. The history books were rewritten. Photographs were altered or faked. Various personages, once prominent in the Party, were recast as counterrevolutionaries and traitors. In 1920, Leon Trotsky was universally acknowledged to be the most significant leader, after Lenin, of the Bolshevik Party. Stalin was recognized, if at all, as an obscure functionary who had played no part in the October Revolution. But by 1940 (the year of his assassination in exile at the hands of an NKVD agent) Trotsky had been transformed into the primal traitor and defiler of the Party’s revolutionary socialist purity. Stalin, meanwhile, was hailed as Lenin’s partner in the October Revolution, the man who inherited and completed Lenin’s revolutionary task. (George Orwell later appropriated Stalin and Trotsky to serve as Big Brother and Emmanuel Goldstein, the chief symbolic characters of Nineteen Eighty-four.)

Considered in toto, the crimes of the Stalinist regime were comparable those of the Hitler regime in Germany. The difference was that when Nazi Germany collapsed, its crimes were exposed. But the Soviet Union lived on, and though the leadership groups that followed Stalin never resorted to his methods, they were the inheritors of the Great Terror and the keepers of its secrets. For those at the summit of Soviet power, the truth was their deadliest enemy.

In the long period of decline between Stalin’s death and the implosion of the polity he built, there were two intervals of relative sanity.

In the Fifties Nikita Khrushchev, who had been a loyal Stalinist, embarked upon a program of economic and political reform. He perceived that such reforms had to include some concessions, however minor, to historical truths. In his Secret Speech to the XX Party Congress (25 February 1956) Khrushchev ventured to criticize the Stalinist “cult of personality” and to condemn, if only partially, the crimes of the Stalin era. It was a profound shock to the system, not only in the Soviet Union but in the Soviet Bloc and around the world. Many Western Communists had their revolutionary faith shaken. In Poland and Hungary, Khrushchev’s revelations helped to touch off revolts that had to be put down by the Soviet Army.

Khrushchev’s colleagues came to view his political and economic reforms, of which the Secret Speech was a key component, as reckless and destabilizing. They were right to do so. After Stalin, the choice confronting the Soviet leadership was stark: stasis or dissolution. The system inaugurated by Lenin and perfected by Stalin had yielded its full potential in the Second World War—not surprisingly, since the essence of Bolshevism was the application of military methods to the problems of politics, culture and the economy. But on the morrow of its victory over Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union’s decline and fall commenced.

The downturn, scarcely perceptible at first, eventually became impossible to ignore. And it presented an intractable problem. Clearly, reform was necessary. Equally clearly, reform demanded a relaxation of discipline on the political, cultural and economic fronts. Very tentatively, Khrushchev tried to do this. But it soon became apparent that glasnost, as it was later to be called, threatened to undermine the regime itself. For the truth, if it ever came out, would show that the October Revolution and the building of socialism had been a disaster for Russia, a disaster for Ukraine, a disaster for all the peoples imprisoned within the borders of the Soviet Union. And once this became clear, once it could be talked about, the Party’s claim on power would come to be seen for the lie that it was. So: stasis or dissolution.

Needless to say, Stalin’s heirs chose stasis, deposing Khrushchev and reestablishing Stalinism, albeit in a minor key. The Great Lie was rehabilitated. This was the dominant theme of the Brezhnev era. “Don’t talk to me about socialism,” he is reputed to have said. “What we have, we hold.” But with the passage of time, behind the façade of superpower status, the regime’s grip gradually weakened. By 1985, when Mikhail Gorbachev assumed power, it was clear that the USSR was in terminal decline. Like Khrushchev before him, Gorbachev embarked on a reform program—and this time the fears of Khrushchev’s colleagues were realized. The deconstruction of the Great Lie was accomplished, the truth about the origins of the regime was laid bare, and with dizzying speed the Party and the state that it dominated fell to pieces.

The history of the Bolshevik Party and the regime it established embodies many lessons, prominent among them the destructive power of the Lie and the fitful, uncertain power of the Truth. In Russia the Great Lie was demolished—but it may be that the damage it did can never be repaired. Detectable in the rule of V. Putin is a definite nostalgia for the Stalin era, when the USSR bestrode the world like a colossus, the worm-eaten rottenness of its foundation not yet obvious. The Truth, alas, has not set Russia free. Indeed, it seems that the Russian people regret the breaking of the chains that Stalin forged to bind them.

Some on the Western Left did come to see the Soviet project for what it was. George Orwell, convinced socialist though he was, decried the worship of Stalin and the celebration of the USSR among many on the British and American Left. He became, indeed, one of the founding fathers of anticommunism—and for that there were and are many on the Left for whom Orwell stands condemned as a backslider and traitor.

The Stalin era has cast a long, dark shadow of intellectual and moral corruption over the Western Left. Though it has become difficult to deny Stalin’s crimes, a conditioned reflex of minimization and rationalization still disfigures the leftist body politic. Examples abound. In his 1979 doctoral dissertation, the UCLA historian J. Arch Getty argued that Stalin was not directly responsible for the Great Terror of the Thirties, claiming with a straight face that out-of-control local officials and zealous bureaucrats had taken the bit between their teeth, acting without Stalin’s authorization. Nor has he ever modified his views.

Then there’s Stephen Kotkin, a professor of history at Princeton University and the author of a multivolume biography of Stalin. According to him the 1931-33 famine that killed millions of Soviet peasants has not a deliberate act of state terror. On the contrary, he claims that the famine was an unintended consequence of the drive to collectivize agriculture—which was, after all, part of the grand plan to “build socialism.”

In their soft-pedaling of Stalin’s crimes, Getty and Kotkin have plenty of company among his colleagues. What cannot be denied outright or sponged away becomes a study in ambiguity. Stalin and the ideological house he built have never lacked for the justifications and excuses, blatant or subtle, of useful idiots.

All this is disreputable enough. Worse, though, is the fact that the Western Left’s defense of the Bolshevik Revolution and the party-state it spawned led it to internalize the regime’s ideology.

The antisemitism that was latent in Marxism-Leninism, was a marked characteristic of Stalinism. Today we see it we see it reproduced in the “anti-Zionism” of postmodern progressivism and leftism. The “rootless cosmopolitans” of Stalin’s day are the “colonialist settlers” of today. Indeed, the antisemitism of the Soviet regime and its critique of Western capitalism are barely distinguishable from that of the contemporary Left, relying as they do on familiar prattle about “imperialism,” class conflict, and the glorification of revolutionary terrorism— embodied just now in the genocidal aspirations of Palestinian nationalism and the Islamofascist barbarism of Hamas.

The past is never dead. It isn’t even past: William Falkner’s trenchant observation resonates today. The events of October 7-8, 2023, remind us that neither individual human beings nor humanity in the large can outrun history. A company of frightful fiends does close behind us tread.