Russia 1917-1918

While all are agreed that the overthrow of the Russian Empire in 1917 was one of the most important happenings in recorded history, honest attempts to find out exactly what did happen, how it was planned and carried out, have always been attended by difficulty and danger. In the Soviet Union the propagation of any opinions and ideas not approved by the state was for many years a punishable offense, incurring even the death penalty. And in the West methods of persuasion, pressure and intimidation have been used consistently to sustain the fiction that all that happened in Russia was the overthrow of a harsh Tsarist tyranny by Russia's long-suffering masses.

There was a Russian revolution with Bolshevik involvement; but that does not make it a Bolshevik revolution, as shall be explained. Indeed, there is as yet no word in any languages which represents exactly the complex meaning of what happened; so we are compelled to use expressions like “Russian revolution” and “Bolshevik revolution” in this article until the long-concealed full meaning can be unfolded.

Historical Revisionism on the subject of the Revolution has made more progress in the Soviet Union than in the West, for a reason which can be stated quite simply: the populations of that vast empire, and especially of Russia, know more and think more about it because they have suffered most; and there is nothing like suffering to awaken and enliven the mind.

Recently Britain's Cambridge University cancelled plans to award an honorary degree to Soviet mathematician Igor Shafarevich after it became known that in Russia, he had publicly expressed views which are still held to be unacceptable in Western academic circles. And in the United States there was an outcry in the media when it was discovered that a group of Soviet editors and writers on a state-sponsored visit included three who had appended their signatures, along with those of 70 other leading intellectuals, to a letter about the Revolution published in the respected journal Literaturnaya Rossiya.

The essential facts about the Revolution and the reign of terror to which it gave rise, including the cold-blooded murder of the Royal Family, were always accessible to anyone who insisted on knowing the truth; it was, therefore, only the systematic suppression of information and debate on both sides of the so-called Iron Curtain which could have kept almost the entire world in ignorance on the subject for more than 70 years. Indeed, it is because the available facts are unassailable and their meaning virtually self-evident, that they could be combated only by suppression.

Therefore we are powerless to understand what is happening in the Soviet Union today and in all other countries which were under Communist totalitarian rule unless we first find out exactly what happened in Russia in 1917 and 1918, when it all began.

Another major political phenomenon of the present time for which explanation and elucidation must be sought in the past is a massive Jewish exodus from the Soviet Union – a sharp reversal of the trend in 1917 and the years immediately following, when Jews from all over the Western world were streaming into Russia.

“Antisemitism is forcing the biggest exodus in 500 years,” cries a headline in the London Financial Times. According to Nathan Shcharansky, a much-publicized Soviet dissident now living in the West, Jewish families have been applying for permits to leave the Soviet Union at a rate of 2000 a day and the queue of would-be emigrants could be as long as one million. Other Jewish spokesmen have put the figure at anything between two million and four million.

There is no mystery about their reasons for wanting to leave; the Jews are being blamed for the Revolution and for the population massacres that followed.

Shcharansky said in an interview with the London Times:

This is something quite different from the street-level antisemitism of the past For the first time the Russian people have realized what an awful history they have had. It is no longer Solzhenitsyn saying there were 60 million victims of state terror; now conservative Soviet historians are estimating 40 million. So the Russians have found that it was their regime that destroyed all the cultural institutions, all the moral values, and every day they see it discussed on television, and their historians tell them, and new graves are discovered. And, of course, they remember who was Karl Marx, and someone is saying that the grandfather of Lenin was Jewish… It is mother nature that the scapegoat becomes the Jew.

What Shcharansky and other Jewish leaders find most disturbing about the new antisemitism, “no longer just street-level,” is the fact that it is to be found in intellectual circles. Here, he says, it takes the form of a debate around the question of Jewish responsibility for the years of Bolshevism.

Indeed, that was the charge levelled at the Soviet mathematician, Igor Shafarevich, forcing Cambridge University to cancel a plan to award him an honorary degree. In a manifesto entitled “Russophobia,” Shafarevich claimed that what he called “a very active Jewish component” was among those who “slander the Russian nation.” He also stated that in the revolutionary movement, which he blamed for having destroyed Russian values, “Jewish revolutionaries were motivated by a desire for revenge instilled by 2000 years of Jewish religious heritage,” and that “a radical Jewish nationalism was present in the Revolution and is still present.”

So too, the letter signed by 77 leading Soviet intellectuals and published in Literaturnaya Rossiya spoke harshly of the Jewish role.

There was nothing “primitive” or “street level” about the three Soviet visitors who were castigated by the Washington Post and other American papers. One is a popular author, another a prominent scholar at the World Literary Institute in Moscow and the third chief editor of the literary journal Nash Sovremennik (Our Contemporary). Another member of the visiting group, Stanislav Kunayev, who is editor of Literaturnaya Rossiya explained that the criticism is not aimed at Jews as such but at Zionists. Americans were reminded, however, that this Mr. Kunayev had declared in his paper in June the previous year that the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion was not a forgery as alleged by Jewish leaders, but a genuine document, the product of what he called “an anti-human intelligence and an almost unnatural satanic will.”

The American press could have been more explicit about the eagerness of Jews to get out of the Soviet Union. Moscow's Maly Theatre had been drawing packed houses, standing room only, with a play by Sergei Kuznetzov, entitled “I Will Repay” (a variation of the Lord's “Vengeance is mine”) in which the last moments of the Royal Family at Ekaterinburg are movingly reenacted. In this play the Jewish role is handled obliquely, with the Tsar's doctor Botkin saying to one of the revolutionaries, evidently a Jew, “The time will come when everyone will believe that it was the Jews who were responsible for this, and they will be the victims.”

But Russians did not have to wait for the play in order to find out what happened to their former monarch; months earlier one paper, Soviet Press, had published a grisly account of events at Ekaterinburg drawn from only one possible source, namely the exhaustive archive prepared by Nikolai Sokolov, the brilliant young investigator appointed by Admiral Kolchak after the White Army had recaptured Western Siberia from the Bolsheviks. In this newspaper report the chief executioner, a Jew, Yankel Yurovsky, is described as he silenced the wounded and moaning Tsarevich, Alexis, with two revolver shots.

It is therefore not without reason that many Jews in the Soviet Union now regard themselves as an endangered species. The former Moscow correspondent of the London Jewish Chronicle, on her way to settle in the United States, declared that the only help which Soviet Jews could appreciate was that which would enable them to leave the country. And the Israeli government has announced that it will need an extra 1.1 billion pounds a year in aid from around the world to enable it to cope with an unprecedented rush of immigrants, of whom 200,000 were expected in the ensuing 12 months.

In 1917 and during the years immediately following, there was a flood of Jews moving in the opposite direction, all eager to assist in the Revolution and to share in the spoils of victory.

Writes Robert Wilton, then London Times correspondent in Russia:

…a lamentable feature of the revolutionary period was the constant passage of Russian and pseudo-Jew revolutionaries from Allied countries. Every shipload that came from America, England or France gave trouble. They all considered themselves to be entitled to a share in the spoils and had to be provided win fat places in the Food, Agrarian and other Committees.

With few exceptions, all these immigrants were Jews.

The German Role

How, where and when the professional revolutionaries, led by Lenin, were set in motion can be pinpointed exactly: it was in Vienna in the autumn of 1915, when the German and Austrian General Staffs came together to plan an operation designed to knock Russia out of the war as an ally of Britain and France. If that could be achieved, not only would many more troops be available on the hard-pressed Western Front, but the German and Austrian people, threatened with starvation by the Allied blockade, would gain immediate access to the Ukraine's vast food supplies.

It was at that meeting that the broad outlines of the revolution were worked out and leading actors in it chosen – Lenin with Sverdlov and other experienced Jewish activists, many of whom had fled from Russia during the preceding decade to escape arrest by the Tsar's secret police organization, the Okhrana, and were then congregated in Zürich, Switzerland, and elsewhere in Europe. About one hundred of these were permitted to travel through Austria and Germany in a sealed train and to infiltrate Petrograd when the revolutionary process was already well advanced. An entire shipload of other Jewish revolutionaries, including Leon Trotsky (Bronstein), travelled from New York and caused a momentary international stir when their ship was stopped at Halifax, Nova Scotia by the Canadians, who were astonished at finding so many of the world's most notorious political agitators all travelling together. However, under pressure from high quarters in the United States, the ship was permitted to continue on its way.

Lessons of History

When the main facts of the Russian Revolution period are brought together there are meanings of the greatest historical importance to be found, meanings which cannot be found in the facts when considered separately.

The Revolution period can thus be compared with a giant jigsaw puzzle, the main difference being that facts of history must be assembled in the mind and their mutual intelligibility explored by a mental process we call induction. Facts which belong together are then found to come together, and we understand them as we could not understand them before.

An example of the exercise of this mental function is provided by three modern American scholars:

Two world wars and their intervening wars, revolutions and crises are now generally recognized to be episodes in a single age of conflict which began in 1914 and has not yet run its course. It is an age that has brought to the world more change and tragedy than any other in recorded history. Yet, whatever may be its ultimate meaning and consequence, we can already think of it and write of it as a historical whole [emphasis added].[1]

Those scholars were unable to find the “ultimate meaning” of our age of conflict but were able to put together enough of the pieces of evidence to be left in no doubt that they all belong together.

As a total mind picture of our age of conflict must necessarily absorb and fully explain the Russian Revolution period, so too a vividly clear mind-picture of the Russian Revolution period must throw some light on an age of conflict which has so much in common with what happened in Russia.

If one portion of a jigsaw puzzle is correctly assembled, it is bound to be easier to assemble the rest of the pieces. Thus, if we can get a sharp and clear picture of only one portion of the Russian Revolution period, we could be well on the way to an understanding of the entire Revolution period and of an age of conflict of which wars and revolutions were only so many “episodes.”

Genocide at Ekaterinburg

One portion of the Revolution period which offers itself at once for concentrated attention is that which surrounds the assassination of the Royal Family and all the other Romanovs on whom the Bolsheviks could lay their hands. The killing of the Tsar at Ekaterinburg on direct orders from the Bolshevik leaders in Moscow was an event of supreme historical importance, and was more thoroughly investigated and documented than any other during the entire Revolution period.

On April 5, 1990 Sothebys, London, offered for sale by public auction what the Daily Telegraph had described a few days earlier as “dynamite papers,” these being an almost complete record of an investigation carried out after the White Army under Admiral Kolchak recaptured Ekaterinburg from the Bolsheviks early in July 1918.

An earlier attempt to investigate the crime having made very little progress, the Kolchak administration gave the task to Nikolai Sokolov, with all the assistance he would require. The complete record, of which five signed copies were made; came to be known as the Sokolov Archive and was supplemented with the depositions of many other persons about other aspects of the Bolshevist reign of terror.

One copy of the complete dossier was given to Robert Wilton, the London Times correspondent who was attached to the White Army, and formed the basis of his book The Last Days of the Romanovs.

Another set of the papers was given to General Diterichs, the officer in charge of the inquiry, and was the main source of a now-rare two-volume work by Diterichs, published in Vladhostock in 1922. Sokolov's own book, Les Derniers Jours des Romanov, was also published in a Russian version in Paris in 1924. The most complete compilation of information about the massacre of the Royal Family and other Romanovs, drawn from the Sokolov Archive and other sources, was prepared by Nikolai Ross and published in two volumes in West Germany in 1987.

What this means is that a vitally important chapter of Russian history, including a most detailed account of the actual killing, supported with the sworn depositions of key witnesses, as well as copies of crucial messages recovered from the post office at Ekaterinburg, was rescued from oblivion and is no doubt already circulating among Russia's anti-socialist intellectuals.

The Sokolov Archive also uncovers completely the elaborate measures taken by the Bolsheviks to conceal their crime, including the burning of the bodies, the dissolution of the remaining bones with sulphuric acid and the dumping of the entire residue in a disused iron ore shaft in the forest outside Ekaterinburg.

If any doubt remained about final responsibility for the crime, it would have been dispelled by a telegram in code addressed to Yankel Sverdlov, head of the Cheka secret police and then more powerful than his close associate Lenin. This states simply that the entire Royal Family, and not only the head of it, had died.

One fact of major importance is revealed: the Tsar was not killed by the Russian revolutionaries.

Wilton says that at the beginning of July (1918) “suspicion must have arisen among the Jewish camarilla” that the Russian soldiers guarding the Imperial Family were undergoing a change of attitude. Avdeiev, a Russian who had been in charge of the prison-house and had permitted local nuns to bring a small supply of eggs and milk to the prisoners, was dismissed and the Russian guards moved out of the house to other premises on the other side of the lane. Only one of the Russians remained, the fanatical Bolshevik Pavel Medvedev, who retained his post as chief warder.

These changes were made by Yankel Yurovsky, son of a local Jewish ex-convict and head of the local Cheka. Yurovsky brought with him a squad of ten “Letts” – so the locals described them – to mount guard in the crowded prison, hitherto the stately house of a wealthy Jewish merchant, one Ipatiev. They were, in fact, not Letts at all but men of mixed Magyar-German descent, probably brought from Hungary, as their scribblings on the walls indicated.

The Russians were given the task of mounting guard outside the house until the evening of July 16, when all their weapons, Nagan pistols, were collected by Medvedev and handed over to Yurovsky.

Wilton provides a vivid account of the last moments of the Imperial Family and their few trusted servants, drawn from eye-witness depositions, of which the following are extracts:

When midnight by solar time had gone some minutes Yurovsky went to the Imperial chambers. The family slept He woke them up and told them that there were urgent reasons why they should be removed… All rose, washed and dressed themselves… Yurovsky led the way downstairs… Alexis could not walk His father carried him in his arms. Dr. Botkin came directly after the family and after him came the chambermaid Demidova, the cook Haritonov and the footman Trupp… The family were ushered into a semi-basement chamber and told to wait.. Yurovsky advanced into the death chamber and addressed the Tsar “Your relatives have tried to save you, but it could not be managed by them, so we are compelled to shoot you.” Twelve revolvers volleyed instantly. The parents and three of the children, Dr. Bodkin and two servants died instantly. Alexis moaned and struggled until Yurovsky finished him off with a pistol shot in the head. The youngest girt Anastasia, fought desperately before being killed. The maid servant lasted longest and had finally to be bayoneted to death.

Medvedev afterwards told his wife exactly what had happened, boasting that he was the only Russian “workman” who had participated, all the others being “not ours,” meaning they were foreigners. Captured later by the White Army, he confirmed what he had told his wife, except that he denied having joined in the shooting.

Trotsky, in his diary, now kept at Harvard University, records that on a visit to Moscow shortly after the fall of Ekaterinburg to the White Army he asked Sverdlov, “And where is the Tsar?” Sverdlov replied that he had been shot, “And the family?” “Shot also,” replied Sverdlov. “What of it?”. “Who decided it?” asked Trotsky. Sverdlov's reply: “We decided it here. Ilyich (Lenin) considered that we should not allow them to have a living banner.”

The purely political objective of depriving the Russian people of the unifying principle of their monarchy was compounded by a kind of fiendish vengefulness lusting incessantly for gratification. This is almost certainly what was meant by the mathematician Shafarevich when he wrote of the Bolshevist “desire for revenge instilled by 2000 years of the Jewish heritage,” and what the editor of Literaturnaya Rossiya referred to as an “anti-human intelligence and an almost unnatural satanic will.”

Here is a glimpse of the conditions visited on the Tsar, his wife Alexandra, his ailing and suffering son and four lovely young daughters by order of Isai Goloshchekin, the Cheka chief in the Ural region and their jailer-in-chief at Ekaterinburg.

The men (guards) were coarse, drunken criminal types such as a revolution brings to the surface. They entered the family's rooms at all hours, prying with drunken leering eyes into everything they might be doing; but picture the torments of the captives to have to put up with their loathsome familiarities. They would sit down at the table when the family ate, put their dirty hands into the plates, spit, jostle and reach out in front of the prisoners. Their greasy elbows, by accident or design, would be thrust into the Tsar's face…

However, it was these Russian guards, coarse and drunken as they were, who began at last to show signs of being sorry for the suffering family in the crowded Ipatiev house, and had to be replaced with complete foreigners in readiness for the final act of regicide.

Writes Wilton:

The last week of their lives must have been the most dreadful one of all for the Romanovs. Brutal and bestial as the Russians had been in the early part of their wardenship, they were preferable even at their worst to the silent relentless torture applied by Yurovsky, who was also a drunkard… The man and his executioners only waited for the signal that was to come from Yankel Sverdlov.

The purely Jewish character of the regicide was masked only by the figure of the Russian workman Beloborodov. This man, a leader of the local mineworkers, had been arrested for the theft of funds, an offense for which under Soviet law he could have been executed. Instead of having him shot, however, Goloshchekin, the Urals Cheka chief, installed him as president of the Urals Regional Soviet in order to deceive the local workers, who were a tough and self-willed lot much averse to being ruled from Moscow and even more strongly averse to being ruled by Jews. Beloborodov, a fervent Mazist revolutionary, thus made the perfect puppet, and it was in his name that the crucial telegram in code was sent to Sverdlov.

By this time the Provisional Government had been taken over entirely by the Bolsheviks and power was fast slipping out of the hands of the Germans who had sent them in, a development signalized by the assassination in Moscow of the German ambassador and chief representative Mirbach.

There is reason to believe that the Germans had been planning secretly to bring the Royal Family back to Moscow from Tobolsk, where they had lived in exile since the year before, dislodge the Bolsheviks, and set up a govenment of their own under Alexis or one of the other Romanovs. This they failed to accomplish. The Tsar, on his way back to Moscow, was halted at Ekaterinburg, where he was joined soon afterwards by the rest of his family and held captive until all were assassinated.

It had always been the intention of the Germans, only to impose their will on Russia and not destroy it as a nation; and that is certainly what would have happened if General Ludendorff's proposal had been put into effect when direct German armed intervention was still possible.[2]

A Holocaust Exposed

The Bolsheviks were desperately anxious to conceal from the Russian people and from the whole world the truth of what happened at Ekaterinburg, and it was only by a wholly unexpected combination of circumstances that they did not succeed. One factor was the recapture of the Urals area by the White Army only nine days after the crime was committed, and another was the availability of so gifted and dedicated an investigator as Nikolai Sokolov. Moreover, like so many murderers before them, Goloshchekin, Yurovsky and their acolytes failed, even with the use of petroleum and sulphuric acid, to eliminate all the visible and tangible evidence; nor could they prevent the inquisitive local peasants from rushing to the site of the burning at the first opportunity and of talking about the bits and pieces of jewelry and precious stones they had found scattered in the grass or pressed into the mud.

Miners brought in by Sokolov found a false floor under a layer of ice at the bottom of the shaft, and when this was removed the first thing that came to view was the body of Jemmy, the little King Charles spaniel which had accompanied its master, the Tsarevich, to the death chamber and had evidently been dispatched with a blow on the head.

Concealment of the real nature of the crime outside Ekaterinburg was much easier.

In the London Times of July 22, 1918, an official Bolshevik version of what had happened at Ekaterinburg was published as news of the day.

Recently, it was stated, “a counter-revolutionary conspiracy was discovered, having as its object the wresting of the tyrant from the hands of the [Ural] Council's authority by armed force.” In view of this fact, the President of the Urals Regional Council decided to shoot the ex-Tsar. On the strength of what was described as “extremely important material,” including the ex-Tsar's diaries, the Central Executive Committee in Moscow had accepted the decision of the Urals Council.

“The wife and son of Romanov,” the Times report added, had been sent to an place of security.

In the English press the former Tsar, friend and ally of the British and cousin of King George V, is already only “Romanov” and “the tyrant.”

This report, virtually every sentence of it a lie, as Wilton explains, reflects what was to be the attitude of the entire “capitalist” world towards a supposedly anti-capitalist revolutionary movement which had so recently robbed Britain and France of a valued ally in their struggle with Germany.

An altogether new story had to be improvised by the Bolshevists when they realized that the White Army had proof that the entire Imperial Family had perished. So a year later, totally disregarding their own previous official pronouncement, they issued another statement (quoted in full by Wilton) to the effect that the Soviet at Perm had brought to trial 28 persons accused of having murdered the late Tsar, his wife and family and suite, eleven persons in all. One Yakhonov was said to have admitted that he had arranged the murder in order to bring discredit on the Soviet authorities.

This account of a mock trial, based possibly on the trial of 28 persons on a wholly different charge, was widely quoted at the time by Jewish organizations in the West, with the aim of absolving the Bolsheviks of any blame for the murder of the Imperial Family and dispelling the notion of a “Jewish racial vendetta.”

In a further attempt to suppress the details of a vitally important chapter of history, the Joint Foreign Committee of the Jewish Board of Deputies and the Anglo-Jewish Association in Britain published an interview with the man who was first entrusted by Admiral Kolchak with the task of finding out exactly what had happened to the Imperial Family. This was Starynkevich, a Jewish lawyer, then Minister of Justice in the Urals region installed by Kerensky's Provisional Government. Starynkevich had appointed one Sergeiev, believed to be another Jew, to carry out the actual investigation. And it was because Sergeiev was making no progress that he was brushed aside and replaced with the magistrate Sokolov.

The former Minister was now quoted as saying that his team of investigators had found no trace whatever of any Jewish involvement in the killing. This was a brazen falsehood and was evidently intended, since it proved nothing, to give Jewish organizations abroad a means of confusing and obscuring the whole issue.

This Starynkevich would have been well aware that the Board of the Ural Regional Council of Deputies responsible for the fate of the Imperial Family consisted of five members: Beloborodov, the Russian “dummy” as president, Goloshchekin, Safarov, Voikov, and Syromolotov, all four Jews, and that the Cheka (Chrezvychaika) was run by Goloshchekin, Efremov, Chustkevich and three other Jews. It was these men who were entrusted with the task of wiping out the Tsarist family; the local Council “representatives of the people,” only learned about it four days later.

By a weird quirk of fate, one of the regicides seems to have yielded to an impulse to leave his racial and national signature in the death chamber in the Ipatiev house. Or could it have been purely fortuitous that words written on the wall placed this latest act of regicide firmly in the context of those “2000 years of Jewish religious heritage” mentioned by a modern Russian scholar?

The words, carefully inscribed in pencil, were an adaptation of the Jewish poet Heine's lines on the fate of Belshazzar, King of the Chaldeans:

Belsatsar ward in selbiger Nacht
Von seinen Knechten umgebracht.

The writer seems to have tried to bring the words a little closer to the occasion, changing the poet's “Belshazzar” to “Belsatsar” and replacing “selbigen” in the second line with “seinen,” signifying that it was his own people who had murdered the monarch.

More Romanovs Butchered

The murder of nationhood itself being purposed by the Bolsheviks right from the start, anything that could arm the Russian people with a sense of identity, anything that could serve as a “banner,” as Lenin called it, had to be eliminated. Hence the hunting down of the entire Romanov family, the possible repository of a future claimant to the throne around whom a revived national sentiment might cluster.

First of the Romanovs to go, a month before the Tsar, was Grand Duke Michael, the ostensible heir, named by Nicholas when he abdicated. Michael, who had publicly renounced all claim to the throne, had been exiled to Perm in the Urals, where he had been free but under close surveillance. Received with ovations when he first appeared in the streets in Perm, Michael Romanov had decided thereafter to avoid being seen, for fear of angering the local Cheka. On about June 12 he was awakened in the middle of the night and, with his secretary, Nicholas Johnson, taken away by three armed men, never to be seen again.

The neighborhood of Perm was to witness many more horrors, says Wilton, who researched this area very thoroughly with Sokolov. Other members of the Romanov family who were interned there included the Empress's sister, the Grand Duchess Elizabeth, the Grand Duke Sergius Mikhailovich and the Princes Igor, Ioan, Constantine and Vladimir. The murder of the Romanovs at Perm, none of whom had been involved in politics, occurred almost exactly 24 hours after the killing at Ekaterinburg. Informed that they were to be moved to a place of greater safety, they left Perm in small horse-drawn carriages, were transported eight miles into the forest and there shot or bludgeoned to death. The site had been well chosen, for nearby were more iron ore mine shafts down which the bodies were flung. The killers this time, as Wilton reports, were “simply Russian criminals, escaped convicts who worked for the Red Inquisition.”

It was clearly established, too, that the order for the killings came from Sverdlov in Moscow and was carried out by the leading Jewish Commissars of Perm, among them Commissar of Justice Soloviev, Goloshchekin and their Russian puppet Beloborodov. Again the Bolsheviks announced that a conspiracy had been frustrated, and they tried to strengthen their story by dumping the body of a murdered peasant at the school building where their prisoners had been held, describing it as that of one of the “White bandits.”

Another group of prisoners, all of them members of the Royal household, who had been transferred to Perm from the jail at Ekaterinburg as the Bolshevik forces quit that town, were slaughtered. They included three women of distinction and four men. The Tsar's former valet, Volkov, was to have been included but escaped and was able to supply an exact account of what happened.

On January 29, 1919, half a year later, four more Romanovs, including the historian Nicholas Mikhailovich, long held in captivity in Petrograd without any charge, were transferred to the Fortress of SS. Peter and Paul and shot. Other members of the Tsar's former staff, including the faithful Prince Dolgoruky, imprisoned at Ekaterinburg, were never heard of again.

The tragedy that befell the Romanovs epitomizes the greater tragedy which engulfed all the people of the Russian empire, as the history of the Revolution epitomizes the global tragedy of an age of conflict and suffering without precedent in recorded history.

The Red Terror which, in one form or another, was to cost the lives of an estimated 50 million people, was proclaimed on September 1, 1918, less than two months after the Ekaterinburg massacre. The immediate excuse for it was the murder of Uritsky, the bloodstained Jewish Cheka chief in Petrograd – by another Jew, as it turned out – and an attempt on the life of Lenin.

The official journal Izvestia declared that “the proletariat will reply in a manner that will make the whole bourgeoise shudder with horror.” Kraznaya [Red] Gazeta announced: “We will kill our enemies in scores of hundreds… Let them drown in their own blood.” The Cheka, now presided over by another Jew, Peters, blamed the Socialist Revolutionary Party, which had been responsible for the first stage of the Revolution, and Peters predicted all that was to follow down the years: “This crime will be answered with mass terror… representatives of capital will be sent to forced labor… counter-Revolutionaries will be exterminated.” Zinoviev (real name Apfelbaum) declared that 90 million of the Russian people would be “won over and the rest annihilated.”

All this terror was necessary if Russia's new rulers were to remain in power. There had been too many signs already of the Russians' lingering attachment to the magic of their Royal Family, and not enough enthusiasm for the revolutionary change everywhere being put into effect. At Perm, to take one example at random, a large crowd had turned out to pay their last respects at a public burial of the bodies of the Romanovs recovered by the White Army authorities from the iron ore shafts.

There was no way in which honest common purpose could be established between the Bolsheviks and the mass of the Russian people. The Jewish revolutionaries were chosen by the Germans for the task of destruction precisely because they were Jews and not Russians.

Wilton sums up:

The whole record of Bolshevism in Russia is indelibly impressed with the stamp of alien invasion. The murder of the Tsar, deliberately planned by the Jew Sverdlov and carried out by the Jews Goloshchekin, Syromolotiv, Safarov, VoLkov and Yurovsky, is the act – not of the Russian people but of this hostile invader.

Mystery of Iniquity

There can be only one valid reason for recovering and reviving information about the past which could excite strong feelings of animosity or fear: when it is knowledge of the kind we must possess before we can possibly understand what is happening today inside and outside the Soviet Union.

It is not enough to know that the Bolshevik Revolution had all the worst characteristics of a foreign invasion; it is necessary to find out also how the seemingly impossible was accomplished, the overthrow by a tiny foe of one of the world's great empires.

If the reader is astonished to find the Jewish hand everywhere in the assassination of the Russian Imperial Family, writes Sokolov, he must bear in mind the formidable numerical preponderance of Jews in the Soviet administration.

Lists of the family names and cognomens, or party names, of the ruling bodies of the Soviet administration in 1917/1918 are included in Sokolov's book Les Derniers Jours des Romanov, published in Paris in 1921 and also in the French edition of the Wilton book. Here we see what they reveal:

Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party: 12 members, nine of them Jews.

Council of People's Commissioners: 22 members, 17 Jews.

Extraordinary Commission of Moscow: 36 members, 23 Jews.

Central Executive Committee: 61 members, 41 of them Jews.

But who are the 51 non-Jews in these bodies? Only 12 of them are identified by Sokolov as “Russian”; the rest are described as Armenians, Georgians, Germans, Czechs, Ukrainians, Letts, etc.

From data supplied by the Soviet press at the time, Sokolov found that out of 556 of the most important functionaries of the Bolshevik state in 1918/1919, there were 17 Russians, two Ukrainians, 11 Armenians, 35 Letts, 15 Germans, one Hungarian, 10 Georgians, three Poles, three Finns, one Czech, one Karaim and 457 Jews.

The other Russian socialist parties were similarly composed at leadership level: Menshevik Social Democrats, 11 members all Jews; Communist of the People, five Jews, one Russian; S.R. (Rightwing), 13 Jews and two Russians; Anarchists of Moscow, four Jews and one Russian; Polish Communist Party, all 12 Jews.

Out of 61 individuals at the head of all the leftist or progressive “opposition” parties, there were six Russians and 55 Jews.

These parties, all supposedly anti-Bolshevist, had the effect of preempting any serious attempt by the Russians to pull themselves together and mount an effective opposition to the Bolsheviks. And we see how use was made of members of minority groups within the Russian Empire, many of them traditionally hostile`to the Russians in an effort to mask the essentially Jewish character of the Revolution.

The actual Jewish preponderance may have been even higher than stated by Sokolov, there being a strong likelihood that other Jews were passed off as Russians, Letts, etc.

An Identity Problem

The whole subject of the Jewish identity has remained to this day shrouded with deliberate mystification.

Are we so sure that Lenin – real name Ulyanov – was a Russian? Can we be sure that Lenin, the spiritual and intellectual “banner” offered to the Russian masses as a replacement for Tsar Nicholas, was not a Jew like most of the other Bolshevist leaders?

Lenin's background is one of the Revolution's most jealously guarded secrets. His father was a Russian with some Tartar or Kalmuck blood and was a practising Christian. It is over his mother, born Maria Blank, that a heavy fog of official reticence descended right from the start. There is evidence that Maria's father, Alexander Blank, was a Jew from Odessa who prospered considerably after accepting conversion to Christianity. The identity of Lenin's maternal grandmother, born Anna Grosschkoph, daughter of a wealthy St. Petersburg merchant, is not so clear. There is, to say the least of it, a strong likelihood that she was also Jewish. Lenin's friend N. Valentinev, who wrote in friendly tones about Lenin after he had broken with the Bolsheviks, remarks that Lenin's father, in contrast with his wife Maria, was deeply religious and attended church regularly, and that his wife avoided going to church. Lenin claimed to have been an atheist since he was 16.[3]

If Lenin's maternal grandmother was Jewish, that would have sufficed to make him acceptable as a Jew in Jewish circles. It is not generally known among gentiles that the transmission of the Jewish identity is exclusively matrilineal and that Jewishness on the father's side alone is wholly unacceptable. Indeed, the Jewish line can continue indefinitely from mother to child with a succession of non-Jewish fathers.[4]

This fact has other important implications: a gentile with a Jewish wife could – and generally does – find himself with children being brought up as Jews and whose destiny as Jews he will be inclined to share, while he is never accepted as a Jew.

Many Soviet leaders down the years belonged to these two categories of crypto-Jew either the sons of Jewish women married to gentiles, or gentiles with children being brought up as Jews.

A Double Triumph

Any account of what happened in Petrograd and Moscow in 1917 would be incomplete without some reference to what was happening outside Russia, as Zionism and Communism triumphed simultaneously.

In Russia in September 1917 power passed finally into the hands of Lenin and his fellow Jewish conspirators, and in the same week Prime Minister Lloyd George and President Woodrow Wilson, yielding to pressure exerted by Jewish leaders, committed Britain and the United States to the recognition of a future state of Israel and of its people as a nation.

This most crucial period in world history is summed up by Douglas Reed, former London Times East European correspondent:

In the very week of the Balfour Declaration, the other group of Jews in Russia achieved their aim, the destruction of the Russian nation-state. The Western politicians thus bred a bicephalous monster, one head being the power of Zionism in the Western capitals, and the other the power of Communism advancing from captive Russia. Submission to Zionism weakened the power of the West to preserve itself against the world-revolution, for Zionism worked to keep Western governments submissive and to deflect their policies from national interests; indeed, at that instant the cry was first raised that opposition to the world-revolution, too, was “antisemitism. “[5]

There must be few periods of great historical change – if any – for which we have a more trustworthy, complete and accurate account than that which witnessed the overthrow of a largely autocratic monarchy in Russia and its replacement with a totally alien reign of tyranny and terror.

Robert Wilton was no ordinary historiographer, putting together a story from what other investigators have written, nor even one of the better kind, whose material is drawn from original sources. He writes in the preface to his book Russia's Agony, published in 1918:

During the past 14 years I have been an eye-witness of events in Russia and able to study at first hand the manifold aspects of Reaction and Revolution… I was the only non-Russian civilian who participated in all the phases of the collapse of Socialism as a national force in July last… The men who have figured in Russian affairs during that lengthy period are personally known to me.

Wilton, moreover, was no ordinary foreign correspondent like many others sent out by leading Western newspapers and news agencies; having spent 40 years in the country, he had acquired a perfect command of the language and a scholar’s deep and extensive knowledge of the peoples of that vast territory and their history.

It was, therefore, only a rigorous ban placed on all information and public debate which could have prevented the true story of the Russian tragedy from becoming common knowledge in the West.

There has been Russian revolutionary activity long before the events of 1917-1918, one early example of this being the conspiracy of army officers who had served in the Napoleonic War and had borne the brunt of national disaster and humiliation during the conqueror's march on Moscow in 1812. These young men had become acquainted with the ideals of the French Revolution and were incensed by the obscurantism, corruption and inefficiency of their own government.

This revolutionary activity, however, was only an aspect of an essentially evolutionally process aimed at reform rather than a total overthrow of the existing social and political order, a yearning for change inspired by a new educated class drawn largely from the gentry and embodied by writers like Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Turgenyev, Gogol and Leo Tolstoy.

There was considerable evolutionary development after the first semi-popular Socialist revolution of 1905, one of the major concessions it produced being the setting up of the first parliament or Duma, elected by a wide peasant suffrage, and with Stolypin as Prime Minister.

Underground revolutionary activity, however, continued apace, with three ministers in a row being assassinated. Many of the assassins were young Jews who also carried out hundreds of murders of policemen and the robbing of banks, ostensibly to raise funds for the revolution. Terrorist crimes, in turn, gave rise to a series of pogroms.

After the assassination of Stolypin progress continued at much the same rate under his successor Kokovtsov, and Russia enjoyed an unprecedented decade of material prosperity in which the new local authorities, or zemstvos, and the co-operative movement played a main part Thousands of miles of main railway line and hundreds of miles on either side opened up vast areas for settlement and agrarian development, especially in Siberia.

But always there remained the ulcer of a seemingly insoluble political problem – a resolutely unassimilable and passionately rebellious Jewish minority.

In a word, the Russians had for a long time been unhappy about social and political conditions in their country. Their educated class had become infatuated with Marxism, both as a life philosophy and as a program for political reform, and therefore welcomed to their ranks Jewish fellow citizens who seemed to have embraced the same utopian faith.

The words used by that classic political authority Lord Acton in his comment on the French Revolution fit the Russian Revolution exactly:

The appalling thing in the revolution is not the turmoil but the design; through all the fire and smoke we perceive the evidence of calculating organization. The managers remain studiously concealed and masked, but there is no doubt about their presence right from the start.

In both great disturbances of the existing order cunning use was made of confusion as a weapon of war, creating in each case a situation which could make sense only to its secret managers.

One of the keys to the Russian riddle was the conference of that country's Social Democrats in Stockholm in 1908, at which the word “Bolshevik” first came into use. All the delegates were agreed in their attachment to the teachings of Karl Marx but were divided, or so it seemed, on the question of ways and means. One lot, led by Lenin, insisted on radical activism, propaganda and sanguinary conflict, and were called the Bolsheviki because they formed a majority. The others argued for the elimination of capitalism and inauguration of a workers' paradise by slower and less destructive means; these being the minority at the conference were called (in Russian) the Mensheviki. More precisely, “larger” (Bolshevik) and “lesser” (Menshevik).

The truth, however, as we should now be able to see, is that the setting up of two rival groups was part of a single revolutionary enterprise, with Leninist hardliners firmly ensconsed in both of them.

Basically, this is the Trojan Horse trick in a modern sophisticated form. The Russians and their real leaders were disinclined to use violent measures against the monarchy and ruling class. So how could this wall of natural national resistance be pierced? The answer: give them a great Menshevik political toy, its capacious belly packed with Bolsheviki with Russified names, or party cognomens, all pretending to be good Mensheviki. That is, in fact, exactly what did happen. Hence the appalling confusion – and the deadly precision with which the secret plan was put into effect.

The Chinese sage Confucius once remarked that if given the power he would command that all things should be called by their proper names. Because, said he, there can be no proper communication and no order in society unless correct words are used.

If that test is applied before we consider more closely the detailed and graphic account of the final stages of the revolutionary drama, some unexpected results are produced.

Wilton's “pseudo-Jews” were, in fact, pseudo-Russians concealing their true identity behind Russian names, as Trotsky for Bronstein, Stekhov for Nahamkaz, Zinoviev for Apfelbaum, etc. They were, as Wilton himself defines them, “the hate-laden products of the Pale,” different from other Jews only insofar as they were of the leadership, better educated and in constant communication with the Jewish leadership abroad.

There is need, also, to take a closer look at the “Socialist”. This word, we find, is made to represent two radically different phenomena: 1 – Those who passionately believe in Socialism as a philosophy and program of political change, and: 2 – Those who know it is nonsense but recognize it as something to be used as a political weapon.

What occurred in Stockholm in 1908 was, therefore, not a conference of Socialists and pseudo-Socialists. To be more exact, the pseudo-Socialists were Jewish nationalists. And nationalism is actually the antithesis of Socialism, the first group-conscious or particularist, the other internationalist and universalist, the one demanding group identity and the other wholly against it; the one the negation of the other.

So the “Bolsheviki” never were the “majority” and are more accurately described as the pseudo-Russian minority.

Strictly speaking, therefore, there was no such thing as a “Bolshevik Revolution.” There was a Jewish war of national aggression carried out under cover of a Russian Socialist revolution. In other words, the Russian Socialists with some assistance from the Jews and with the great numbers of the discontented on their side, achieved an overthrow of the old order, only to have victory snatched from their hands in the appalling disorder that ensued by a highly organized Jewish nationalist minority.

We thus find that by substituting the right words and names, there emerges a clear and coherent mind-picture of what happened in Petrograd – and the innumerable separate pieces of information then fit snugly together like the parts of a correctly assembled jigsaw puzzle.

But that leaves an important question unanswered: How was it possible for all those Russian Socialists, most of them well-educated to be used for the purpose of destroying their own nation-state? The complete answer to that question lies deeply hidden in the real meaning of the concept of “Socialism,” a meaning of profound significance for which no word as yet exists. The dictionaries give us only some of the meanings which have been put into the word, leaving the real meaning to be learned only through suffering.

Solzhenitsyn was correct when he said that the real evil is Socialism, not Communism, which is no more than a by-product of it. Painful experience has taught millions of people what Socialism means, nowhere more so than in the Soviet Union and East Europe. But their experience teaches little or nothing to those who have not had the experience or have experienced it only in an attenuated form. What is much needed, therefore, is some attempt at least by those who do know to conceptualize it and put it into words.

It can thus be said of Socialism that it is a perversion of the concept “society” – in much the same way that homosexualism is a perversion of sex. In both cases there is a deviation from the natural, the one unnatural sex and the other unnatural politics. Socialism as believed in and practised in our century, like homosexualism, is contra naturam and unalterably unprocreative.

It was thus an intellectual sterility engendered by the false gospel of Karl Marx which in Russia had the effect of an acquired immune deficiency syndrome, depriving many of the Russian educated or intelligensia of the power to combat the virulent infection of a covert Jewish nationalism. Rendered insensitive to a life-threatening evil in their midst, the Russian intellectuals lacked any power to fight it. Socialism can be described as a modern manifestation of Plato's “lie in the soul”.[6]

Ripe for Revolution

Conditions in Russia early in 1917 met all the requirements of revolutionary change. Discontent had long been fermenting, the country had been involved for two and a half years in an unsuccessful and appallingly mismanaged war, and the unifying influence of the monarchy had been gravely disturbed by the Rasputin scandal. Hence the revolution had a great army of adherents among soldiers and civilians.

An immediate and most keenly felt cause of discontent in Petrograd was a scarcity of bread and other provisions which could have been, at least partly, engineered. A scene had thus been set for which the Russian Socialist revolutionaries had been waiting and preparing.

Speaking in the Duma on February 27 Kerensky announced the approach of the storm: “It's lightnings already illumine the horizon.” He demanded the termination of Russia's involvement in the war. While he was making this speech there were labor demonstrations in the streets, and people waiting in queues outside the shops grew more restive.

The tiny spark that started a blaze of public disorder that was to destroy a great nation occurred on Wednesday, March 7, when an angry old woman threw a stone and broke a baker's shop window. Others joined in, and next day more shops were stoned and looted. Police and Cossack patrols intervened, but the disorder continued to escalate.

The London Times correspondent lived in a house adjoining the Prefecture in the center of Petrograd, knew all the principal civil and military officials and political leaders involved, and was thus able to watch and record all the final stages of the revolutionary capture of the nation's legislative and administrative nerve center.

Generalizations about what happened would be of little historical value unless supported with a vast quantity of factual eye-witness evidence of the kind supplied by Robert Wilton in his book Russia's Agony further endorsed by the contents of the Sokolov Archive.

Wilton has described exactly and in great detail how a genuine reformist movement in Russia was first taken over by an enthusiastic Russian Socialist element and finally by pseudo-Russian and pseudo-Socialist Bolsheviks. We see how a well organized minority of trained operators, armed with a vast accumulated expertise in underground activity and knowing exactly where they were going, were able to impose their will on a majority who never fully understood what was happening and were divided about the reform they wanted.

A very complex and deliberately confused process of enforced political change can be briefly summarized as follows: a Provisional Government made up entirely of elected representatives of the Duma, nearly all of them non-Socialists but all strongly reformist, succeeded in dislodging and replacing a grossly incompetent autocratic regime. The Tsar had been prevented from returning to Petrograd and had abdicated after appointing Prince Lvov as Prime Minister of a Provisional Government.

The Bolsheviks, having launched a mutiny in several of the Guards Battalions and plunged Petrograd into total disorder, created a “Council of Workers and Soldiers” of their own, the “Soviet”. This Soviet, with its Russian Socialist majority, co-operated with the Provisional Government until the Bolsheviks in their midst were able to gain full control, first of the Soviet and then of the Provisional Government

Destruction of Nations

So what is the historical meaning to be distilled out of the countless particulars of that great happening which has always been known as the Bolshevik Revolution but was, in fact, a war of national aggression carried out under the disguise of a revolution?

As the massacre of the Imperial Family epitomizes the entire Revolution period, so does the “Bolshevik Revolution” with its misleading name epitomize for the whole world a century of conflict without precedent in recorded history.

In all three we see the same powers, influences and motives at work with everywhere the same result being sought, namely the destruction of nations. Instead of competitive strife among nations as hitherto, a genocidal extermination of nations is attempted; not war against all nationhood but by one against all others.

Thus we cannot fully understand the assassination of the Russian Royal Family without also understanding the entire Russian Revolution period; and we cannot understand that without also understanding an entire century of strife.

So, too, if by other means we have managed to discover the meaning of our age of conflict, we can easily understand all that happened in Russia in 1917 and 1918.

In other words, the so-called Bolshevik Revolution can be for millions in the West a key with which to unlock the mystery of unfolding contemporary history; it is what they need to know if they are to understand their present situation and propects.

For the whole purpose and meaning of life is inseparably bound up with knowing. If we don't know what happened, we cannot know what to do.

Two major developments in the countries of the West had combined to confer on a geographically dispersed Jewish nation a worldly power it had never enjoyed before in more than 2000 years of its separate existence. One of these was an explosive development in the realm of technics or tools, resulting in a compounding increase in economic productivity; i.e., in the creation of wealth. The other was a progressive decay in shared religious belief, one of the consequences of the so-called “enlightenment”; i.e., the triumph of rationalism over faith as a foundation for all social and political thought.

Moreover, all the circumstances which had prevailed in mainland Europe, especially in Germany, Poland and Russia, while permitting the Jewish people to multiply as possibly never before, had generated in them a feverish group consciousness as they struggled incessently to resist assimilation; it was a group consciousness long cemented by religious belief and practice and later, as the Jews too came under the influence of the “enlightenment,” by a fierce secular nationalism.

The Jews thus found themselves ideally equipped to exploit the opportunities offered by the new age of plenty which began to unfold in the West from the middle of the 19th century. Self-excluded from any activity of a kind conducive to assimilation, they steered clear of invention and wealth- production and concerned themselves almost exclusively with dealing in things, especially in money, activity of a kind that made it easier for them to stay apart. Moreover, the preservation of a separate group identity called for the implementation of a dual moral code, one of shared loyalty and mutual support among “us” (the Jews), and of indifference, hardening from time to time into enmity, against “them” (the host population). The Jews were thus a nation perpetually at war.

All warfare requires the practice of secrecy and deception, but none to the same degree as warfare conducted almost entirely on the battleground of the mind by a nationhood which must itself be studiously concealed.

Jewish national integrity being, therefore, wholly of the mind, a boundless use of the arts of concealment, camouflage and deception was required for its preservation, and one of its most remarkable inventions was falsehood of a kind against which the populations of the West seem to have no natural defense. This takes the form of the truth turned upside down or pulled inside out, producing a lie which most plausibly mimics the truth.

Thus anti-gentilism becomes “antisemitism”; self-exclusion from the host population becomes hurtful discrimination and rejection; and aggressive finance-capitalism takes the form of Socialist and Communist “anti-capitalism”; the practitioners of genocide are represented as the greatest victims of genocide; etc., etc., and most audacious of all, a nation of atheists claims the land Palestine “in fulfillment of God's promise.”

Finding and putting together facts which belong together is, therefore, not always enough; sometimes it is facts which have been stuck together but don't belong together that need to be separated before the truth can be set free.

Prof. Hannah Arendt recognizes the enormous significance of the Jewish presence in 20th century history, but makes no attempt to explain:

Twentieth century political developments have driven the Jewish people into the storm centre of events… the Jewish question and antisemitism… became the catalytic agent first for the rise of the Nazi movement and the establishment of the organizational structure of the Third Reich… then for a world war of unparalleled ferocity…[7]

Jewish high finance was deeply involved in the Russian Revolution from the beginning, and even earlier in the funding of revolutionary activity; and a non-Jewish high finance, also very large but not politically motivated and controlled to the same degree, promptly fell in behind it, glad to be granted a “piece of the action.” Thereafter both worked hand-in-hand in marshalling the forces of a spiritually disinherited Western educated class or intelligensia, its Utopian religion-substitute articulated by the likes of George Bernard Shaw, the Fabian who did not scruple to legitimize falsehood as an instrument even of domestic politics. And all the social sciences, – history, economics, anthropology, etc. – were vitiated, now, like fungus, requiring darkness for their continued cultivation.

The sum total of it all: a 20th century Age of Untruthfulness unprecedented in recorded history.

From Russia, after the end of World War II, the terrorism and tyranny of Jewish nationalism spread like a cancer over the body of all eastern Europe.

In Communist Poland U.S. Ambassador Bliss Lane recorded the predominance of Jews, many of them aliens, in the key posts of population control.

In Hungary Mattyas Rakosi (born Roth in Yugoslavia) was installed as Prime Minister with Red Army support, the London Times reporting that his cabinet was “predominantly Jewish.”

At about the same time the London paper New Statesman recorded that “in Czechoslovakia as elsewhere in south-eastern Europe, both the party intellectuals and the key men in the secret police are largely Jewish in origin.”

Of Romania the New York Times reported in 1953: “Romania, together with Hungary, has probably the greatest number of Jews in the administration.” In Romania the terror raged under Anna Pauker, the daughter of a rabbi.

And in East Germany the Communist reign of terror was presided over by one Hilde Benjamin, at first vice-president of the Supreme Court, then Minister of Justice. Under the direction of “the dreaded Frau Benjamin,” as she was described by the London Tiines, 200,000 East Germans were in two years convicted of the “crime of political opposition.”

Such has been the Jewish nationalist role to this day, with any manifestation of local self-rule, whether in Europe, Latin America or anywhere else, caught between the upper molars of huge financial power with its media and manipulation of party politics, and a lower jaw of subversion, terrorism and revolution.

There is no better present ongoing example of this than in South Africa where the African National Congress and the South African Communist Party, masquerading as “Black liberation,” are only other names for a chauvinist Jewish nationalist imperialism.

In the long haul of history what does all this mean? One fact of supreme importance emerges: The Jewish role in history has been undeviatingly destructive, the very opposite of creative. Any Jew who finds personal salvation in a creative relationship with the rest of mankind – Spinoza, Mendelssohn, Disraeli, etc. – ceases at once to be a Jew. For only they can create, making things and making them work, who can achieve a sympathetic identification with things and with people, loving them for their own sake and not only as a means of gratifying an appetite for possession and power.

It would have needed a love of Russia and its people to make any political system work in that vast country. So there was no way in which the Soviet system could ever have been made to work; and there is likewise no way in which a Jewish nationalism, with its militant alienation from the rest of mankind, can ever achieve lasting viability. A nationhood purely of the mind, in order to survive at all must remain forever nature-unfriendly and spiritually sterile, an object of aversion and reproach to the rest of mankind – hence the so-called anti-Semitism everywhere and always.

Nevertheless, in a paradoxical and most mysterious way, the Jew does seem to have one positive role in the human evolutionary process, comparable with that of the catfish in the tank which quickens and enlivens all the other fish. In Russia already we see how, out of the awful suffering of its people, there is brought forth among the Russians not only a clearer understanding of the Jewish role in history but also, a more profound knowledge of themselves, more and deeper insights into the meaning of life itself, of good and evil-progress of a kind, but at what a price! At what a price!

Notes

Main Reference works:

• The Last Days of the Romanovs, Robert Wilton (Edward Arnold, 1920);
• Russia's Agony, Robert Wilton (Edward Arnold, 1919).