The Pete Quiñones Show - Episode 1062: Who Was the Most Persecuted Group Under the Soviet Regime? w/ J. Otto Pohl

Episode Date: June 4, 2024

58 MinutesPG-13Dr. J. Otto Pohl received his PhD in History from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He has taught at the American University Iraq Sulaimani, University of Ghana, and American University of Central Asia. He is the author of Ethnic Cleansing in the USSR, 1937–1949 (Greenwood, 1999), The Stalinist Penal System (McFarland & Co., 1997), and The Years of Great Silence The Deportation, Special Settlement, and Mobilization into the Labor Army of Ethnic Germans in the USSR, 1941–1955 (Columbia University Press, 2022). His articles have appeared in, among other journals, The Russian Review, Journal of Genocide Research, Human Rights Review, and Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism.Dr. Pohl joins Pete to talk about the true victims of Stalin's purges and deportations and resettlements.The Years of Great SilenceDr. Pohl's SubstackDr. Pohl's PatreonDr. Pohl's TwitterVIP Summit 3-Truth To Freedom - Autonomy w/ Richard GroveSupport Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's Substack Pete's SubscribestarPete's GUMROADPete's VenmoPete's Buy Me a CoffeePete on FacebookPete on TwitterBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-pete-quinones-show--6071361/support.

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So if you head over to Gumroad and you subscribe through there, you'll get the episodes early and ad-free, and you'll get an invite into the telegram group. So I really appreciate all of the support everyone's giving me, and I hope to expand the show even more than it already has. Thank you so much. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekingiano show. I'm here with Jay Otto. pronounce your whole name. I want to say your whole name. I'm going to call you Otto, but.

Jonathan Otto pole Awesome Awesome How are you doing Otto? I'm doing good Good Tell everybody a little bit about yourself First time on the show

I have a PhD I got fairly late I was in my 30s From the School of Orienton African Studies At the University of London And I have A total of four books published Most recent one

Two years ago, the years of great silence published by Ividem Verlag in Stuttgart, dealing with ethnic Germans in the Soviet Union during World War II mostly, although it has chapters both before and after the Second World War. I worked overseas as a history lecturer for 12 years in Kyrgyzstan, Ghana, and Iraq in the Kurdish region and I am currently living in New Mexico where I came originally to be a middle school teacher but the dress of it almost caused me to die in the classroom so I am now currently working as a janitor for a grocery store. Do you see yourself possibly getting getting on with the university or do you um no uh the overseas jobs are pretty dried up

much dried up as has anything in my specific disciplinary field but i've applied to maybe 3,000 jobs in the u.s uh for assistant professor positions and i think i got maybe 10 interviews but the last one would have been uh in 2000 21 So it keeps getting more and more difficult. At this point, it's a better use of resources just to buy lottery tickets. Well, someone turned me on to your substack, 20th century musings in the 21st century. And I read two articles specifically that I got a lot out of, and that's what I wanted to ask you to come on and talk about. They both deal with the same subject, but different, you know, different.

operations in in Soviet Russia. So the first article that I read was the myth that Jews were the ethnic group most persecuted by the Soviet regime, the great terror and national operations. Why do people think that the, what has caused people to believe that Jews were the most persecuted group by the Soviets? Well, for the 37, 38, I think it's because there is a, even a book by a person that used to be a good historian, and then she's completely sold out out of Canada, Lynn Viola. She wrote a very good book on decoulocization, the deportation of Kulaks to special settlement areas,

particularly in the far north in the Arctic Circle, called the Unknown Gulag. But Lin Viola then wrote a book, I kind of remember the title of it, but basically it was about the purge of Jewish NKVe Day agents, a couple hundred of them. from the top ranks of the NKVA Day in November 1938 and how they were the real victims.

But if you look at how many people were arrested and either executed or sent to labor camp by the same people, it's obviously, this would be like writing a book saying that the people at Tangit Nuremberg were the real victims of the Holocaust. But because of the way political power is structured in North America,

she can of course get away with it. So Yagoda, the head of the NKVEDA day from 1934 to 1936, who was executed. Israel Lopleski, who was the head of the NKVEDA in Ukraine during the 37-38 terror, including the Polish and German operation. Boris Bormann, the head of the NKVEDA day in Belarus during this time in 37 and 38. Genrik Ljushkov wasn't executed by the Soviets because he fled to. the Manchuria and the Japanese executed him, but he was responsible for the 37 ethnic cleansing

of Koreans from the Far East. So these people are prominent in the show trials and execution in November 38 all the way up until 1941, but they're only a couple hundred of them. But I think this is where they're looking at. They're saying, well, look at the prominent Jewish communist, and even earlier, Kameneveth and Zinaviv,

the first show trials executed were former Jewish Politburo members. But if you take the total numbers, it's only a couple hundred people. And at this time, you had almost 78,000 ethnic Poles and 46,000 ethnic Germans executed specifically because they were German or Polish in 37 and 38. So what do those numbers look like? What was the Jewish population of Russia at that time? What percentage were they? They were 1.8% of the total population, about 5.5% of the Communist Party.

But under Yagoda and Yejaf, the NKVade, they were between almost 40%, I think it was 38.5% and 20% up until the purged by Biry of them in November 38 of the top 100 or so NKVe Day officers, including, as I said, the Yagoda himself, number one man, Leplewski, number one man for the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, Boris Berman, number one man for Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic, Genrik Ljouchev, the Far Eastern cry, the head of the Gulag from 1930 to 1930, 38, the three men, Kogan, Matvei Berman, who was the brother Boris Berman. He was in power, his head of the Gulag from 32 to 37, and then Israel Plinter. So you really have during the 1930s, when you have deculacization, the Holodomor,

and of course the Great Terror in 37 and 38, complete with national operations against diaspora group, but not Jews, because they didn't have an independent. homeland at that time, about 250,000, and the largest group being the Poles and second German, and then coming up Latvians. What was the justification for basically for the extermination of Poles and Germans and Latvians? Because they were they were diaspora groups that had independent states outside of the Soviet Union. And so it was deemed that because they were ethnically, and the Soviet idea of ethnosis,

that culture is primordial. It kind of combines this idea of primordial culture with biological determinism through endogamy, that is, the groups don't marry out much. So the culture continues to be reproduced through intermarriage of their only within their group. So they would deem that these people ultimately were politically a suspect that they, when it came down to it, they would owe their political

allegiance not to the Soviet Union, but to the government in Warsaw or the government in Berlin or the government in Riga, depending which diaspora group you are talking about. Is that why they didn't go after the Jews because they didn't have a homeland yet? In big part, yes, because they start to in a much less violent and much more toned down measures, because they've gotten rid of the massive violence by then, at the end of the Stalin era.

So you have the anti-cosmopolitan campaign under Jondonov, and then, of course, the doctor's plot, the very end of Stalin's life. And in the post-Dalyn era, you have later after the break between the social, government in Israel, anti-Zionist campaigns within the Soviet Union. But there's never any mass arrest or mass deportations or mass executions of Jews with Soviet citizenship. The one case of mass deportation of Jews by the Soviet government was about 50,000 Polish Jews

that fled German-occupied Poland into the Soviet-occupied era. Soviet-occupied era area in 1939, 1940. And in 1940, they were given the choice. They either accept Soviet passports and citizenship or they would be forcibly relocated as special settlers. And so about 50,000 refused to take Soviet citizenship, wanting to keep their police citizenship, and were forcibly resettled.

But almost all of the survivors and their death rates were much lower than those. of the Polish Catholics that were deported this time were released two years later in 41 with the agreement between the Polish government in exile and the Soviet government to allow Polish citizens to be evacuated out of the Soviet Union into Iran. Going back to the 200 that were, that Stalin killed, why did he get rid of them? because they were closely associated with the former heads of the NKVA day that had been removed, in part because Stalin believed they were creating their own kind of political fiefdoms

that were independent of him and could challenge him. And also largely because the Biria, who was a fellow Georgian, appointed by Stalin, wanted to clear out all of the men that had been appointed by Yagode, and appoint his own men. So you see the NKVe Day after November 38, far fewer Jews, they go down from 20% to 4% in the leadership, but a lot more Georgians, a lot more Russians, a lot more Ukrainians, and a lot more ethnic Armenians.

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Trading as Cooper Financial Services is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland. So a lot of people point to the doctor's plot. I think Francis Parker Yaki looked at the doctor's plot and deemed that the Soviet Union at that point was going in a anti-Semitic direction. Do you see that because of the doctor's plot and how it was handled or was that a misreading? Well, no, I mean, it was aimed at Jews, but the thing is, the number of people that were arrested in. kill is still in a small fraction. We're talking hundreds of people. Whereas when we look at just the executions

in the German operation and the Polish operations, we're talking tens of thousands of people ultimately. The diaspora groups targeted in 37, 38, were altogether equal to the Jewish population, 1.8% of the population. But they formed 250,000 out of 700,000 execution so over a third so let's go back to the to the executions by the the amount executed by nationality polls were the biggest were the biggest how many polls were there about total 78,000

were executed not all in the Polish operation some of them in what's called the Kulak operation and some other operations. And the Polish operation itself, not everybody executed it was Polish. It was about 110,000 people executed it. So, you know, some almost 30,000 were Belarusian and Ukrainians and other nationality. A German operation had about 55,000 executions,

of which about 29,000, I mean, 55,000 convictions of which about 42,000 were executed at about 29,000 of those with Germans. But when you add in Germans executed in other operations like the Kulak operation, which was much harder than the German operation and the Volga German ASSR, most of the German execution for the German operation were in Ukraine and then the next area hit hard with Siberia. We're talking 46,000 or so Germans executed in 1937, 1938.

How do they execute them? A bullet to the back of the head, a 9mm pistol, usually a tokarah. Yeah. Well, let's move forward to the deportations and resettlements. Why only deportations and resettlements? Why aren't they going through the trouble of killing these people? Well, when Biria replaces Yejof and most of the execution, for political reasons as well as other reasons.

Under the Stalin era, almost all executions are for political crime. They occur at 37 and 38, which is the time Yejaf, who was of mixed ancestry. His father was Russian and his mother was Lithuanian, and he was from Vilnius. One of the reasons they suspect he particularly hated Polish people, the Polish operation. When he was placed by Biberia, it was deemed that these mass executions were wasteful because you did not get any labor out of the people you were shooting. So instead, it was deemed that the better way was to punish people in a way which you could get some work out of them, although conditions were so horrible, often people would not be able to work for very long

before they became sick or even died. So Biria moved everything to forced labor from the executions that had been prominent under the Yazov. How are there so many at one point Jews in positions of power? Slezkin's book, The Jewish Century, shows that even in the beginning, it wasn't great, but it grows and it grows. Famously, people said when Trotsky came back from New York,

the people he brought with them were almost every single one of them were Jews. Were they Russians? Were they born Russian? Were they from somewhere else? Was this a Jewish? I don't know. I mean, in the Politburo, the first Politburo, after the Bolshevik take power, has seven people.

And four of them are Jewish, according to. to the Soviet record. So those are Trotsky, obviously, born in Ukraine. Kamenev, who's father was Jewish, but is identified in almost all the literature as an ethnic Jew. Zinaviv and a guy named Solokinov, which I can't find much information on him. It doesn't seem anybody else can, but the Soviet information indicates his national note was Jewish. That's about all I know. were some other high-ranking officials later that were not in the Politburo for very long. Svairdlov, who was responsible for the killing of the Tsar, led the hit squad, but was also the man who kept the records for organization of the party,

a position that Dallin later took over and allowed him to consolidate control over the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In the beginning, you see there's at least three powerful Jews, Trotsky, Kamenov, and Zinivip in the Soviet Pulip Bureau. And they're there from 1917 to 1926. And by, in 1926 and 1927, Stalin begins removing them as the potential actual opposition, so-called left opposition. And by 1928, He has consolidated his power. And there's a brief period of time and there's no Jews in the Pulip Bureau. And then Stalin appoints Kaganovic, who is fiercely loyal to Stalin all the way up until his death right before the Soviet Union collapse. So Kaganovic, if there had ever made any criticism of Stalin near the end of his life, it's veiled that Stalin wasn't harsh enough, didn't kill enough people.

So was it a lot of just nepotism where one person would get appointed and then they'd bring in somebody, they'd bring in, you know, kinfolk, and it would just start growing and growing. Like you said, that one of the reasons for the purge was it seemed like they were trying to consolidate power into themselves. Well, for Jewish domination of the NKVIA officer corps, and going back also the Oge Payu, it's the predecessor, but we don't have. as good of records. Memorial, which is now illegal in Russia, has compiled the nationality of all of the high-ranking NKVADI officers from 1934

to 1941. It appears that a lot of these people were appointed by Yagoda, and they continued on under Yejjah, and then Biria removes them. But there's also the fact, when you look at the Gulag leadership, which is the subsection of the

NKVEDA and later, earlier had been under Oge Peu. What Ann Applebaum says is that the Gulag leadership and administration was a dumping ground for those people in the NKVe Day that were considered not to be very competent or smart. But the leadership you look at, Berman is really responsible for growing it from 1932 to 37, his number two man is Israel Plinter. And Nathalie Franco, one of the few Gulag chiefs that stands out is actually being very, very smart, has a lot written about him by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in the Gulag archipelago.

He had originally come from Haifa and got to the Russia to be a merchant and then ended up getting incarcerated during Lenin's time in the Slovokie camps. the far north. But he kept giving such great advice to the camp administrators on how to squeeze more labor for less food out of the inmate that they made him a gulag official. He became one of the top officials in the 30s, particularly early on with the building the White Sea Baltic Canal. Why is it that when we look at communist crimes, I mean, some of the stuff we've already mentioned, and is, you know, heinous is, you know, just if you're going to kill 100,000 people with just bullets to the back of the head, that takes some kind of will that I don't think the average person can even fathom. So why is it that we don't talk about communist crimes, but say, you know,

anything, you know, anything that Germans have ever done gets brought up or anything, you know, you know anyone who's ever shot a bad look at a Jew has their crimes are amplified. Yeah, well, I think there's been some good academic literature by Jewish scholars on this. One work I would recommend is Yuri Schlesking, who is from the Soviet Union. He's a professor of history at University of California, Berkeley. Technically, I guess, he's only half Jewish. His father is Jewish, but under the Soviet system he was considered Jewish but his rights about how Jews in the Soviet Union and elsewhere became interested and successful in running government becoming

participants in disproportionate members in government the same way they did other industries like Hollywood or banking right so this becomes an ethnic So the NKVEDA and Oge PAU are literally viewed as kind of, this is a Jewish business that we can go into because Yagoda is, you know, knows our family and we can get appointed and go up the ranks and Berman, you know, he had not only Boris Berman, his brother, head of the NKVEDA in Belarus, but another brother, Solomon Berman,

was also a high-ranking officer in the NKVD. So he had three brothers all in the NKVA day, during the Stalin era in the 30s. So that's one explanation. And as far as not remembering it, not talking about it, I think Peter Novics, the Holocaust and American Life, where he talks about starting in the 60s,

you start to see this use and instrumentalization of atrocities and victimization, and particularly he calls the Victimization Olympics, for political power. And he specifically talks about the use of the Holocaust to get support for the state of Israel starting in 1967 with the 60-day war. Ready for huge savings?

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what is it? Well, you know, throughout the entire area, you have probably best term used as V. Giedelman called it the ambivalence, right? So the policy oscillates. But initially, you have, after Stalin dies in 53, you're not, the head of the NKVA day at the time is still Burio. But he is so close to associate with Stalin Khrushchev and Malenkov want to get rid of him along with Kaganovic and Molotov. Now, Beria is executed. Molotov is sent to be ambassador to the People's Republic of Mongolia, or I guess Mongolian People's Republic, obviously. Since it's almost just another Soviet republic, this isn't a big diplomatic posting for Malo.

and Kaganovitch is appointed, I think, as a director of a cement factory in Siberia. So after this time, with Kaganovic removed, there are no more Jews in the Soviet Pulip Bureau for the rest of its existence. But they still remain overrepresented in the rank and file membership of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union,

in part because they have higher education, in part because they're more urbanized, urbanized and also in part because they have put effort into it as a group to try and have as much representation as possible. It's using the government as a type of ethnic industry as it were. So there's no longer a domination the way there was in the early Soviet regime with Trotsky and Kamenov and Zinniv and there's no longer any section. of the Soviet government that's important, like the political police that has a Jewish domination. But they are overrepresented in the Communist Party.

They are overrepresented in a number of desirable positions in the Soviet Union, white-collar jobs, but particularly things like scientists, university, lecturers, published writers, the two best known and probably best quality-wise science fiction writers that the Soviet Union, the Sturgatsky brothers who were Jewish. They wrote a roadside picnic, which was the inspiration for the movie Stalker.

So they have a pretty good position as far as that. And there is no persecution of Jews, Guad Jews, in the post-Soviet era, but there is a strong crackdown after the break with Israel on political Zionists, particularly those who are actively petitioning to emigrate out of the USSR to go to Israel. But again, when you look at total number of arrest, total number of incarcerations, we're only talking a few hundred people, which puts it on about the same par as much smaller groups

that were doing the same type of things, such as the Crimean Tatars, who had only one-tenth the total population. that the Jews had. Yeah, that reminded me of something I wanted to ask, just going back. So, 1948, you have the foundation of Israel. Now there are a diaspora, there are diaspora people with a home. Was there any talk of getting, you know, deportation or, I guess at that point it would have been deportation? Well, there isn't anything in the official Soviet archives.

about any math deportation of Jews with Soviet citizenship. As I said, the only case where we have is those that refuse Soviet citizenship who had Polish passports in 1940. There has always been a lot of writing that there were rumors going around. They kept hearing on the metro and other places that there were planned to deport all the Jews in the Bureau of Bijon, which was the Jewish autonomous Obla, established by Stalin that almost no Jews moved to. But there's nothing in the archive.

So if it was any planning stage, it was a very, very embryonic. As far as that was going to run. And of course, then Stalin died on 5th of March, 1953, and the entirety of Soviet policy changes. Now, initially the Soviets in 48 and 49 were strong, supporters in the UN of Israel. A lot of the armament that were crucial for the Israeli victory of the Arabs came from Czechoslovakia after the communist coup in 1948 in that country. And it appears

that the reason for the break between the Soviet Union, Israel, had to do with the Israelis, not the Soviets, and it had to do with Israelis not at the very top. That is Ben-Gurian liked the fact that he could get a lot of Soviet assistance. He admired the Soviet Union as kind of a strong model for state with a socialist economy, and, of course, its policies towards the Volga German, the Korean Tatars being one to emulate regarding the Palestinian Arabs. But the ambassador to Moscow was Golda Mayer, who was very rude to the Soviets. Golda Mayer essentially said to Jews in the Soviet Union, they should owe their allegiance to Jerusalem and not Moscow.

Told the Soviet government should allow all the Jews, especially the educated ones, to go to Israel rather than rebuild the Soviet Union for the damage caused by World War II. And the Soviets said, well, why don't you have like Jews from the United States, you know, the evil capitalist country that's obviously anti-Semitic, said, no, we want the Jews in the U.S. to stay there and just send us money. And so this types of insults were just almost too much. And coupled with the fact that under Khrushchev, they looked and saw particularly after 1956, that there are a lot more people in Egypt in the Arab world and supporters of them in former colonies. then the small state of Israel that perhaps they should completely change sides, which is what happened. But if Goldemeyer had not been ambassador, if somebody who had the same outlook as Ben-Gurion had been ambassador, I think the Soviet-Israeli alliance would have lasted longer. after the war the the the united states pretty much wants the soviet unions to be like a junior partner to them

from what i understand and Stalin tells them to take a walk and then you see the neocons who are founded by jews and are mostly jews come into existence why why did the neo con what was the reaction was there anything happening with jews in the soviet union that would have caused the neocons to, you know, have like some kind of ethnic animosity, or was it more purely political? Depends on where you want to go. But I mean, a lot of it goes back to the Tsarist era and the pogroms, Kishneyev in 1903. Because most of the Ashkenazi population in the United States are descended of people who left the pale of settlement in the Russian Empire following the pogromes in the early 20th century. And of course, so there's that.

But of course, that took place under the Tsarist government and then during the Civil War. While there are a couple of cases of Bolsheviks engaging in pogrom, most of them were by white forces or Ukrainian nationalist forces or anarchists rather than Bolsheviks. But I think a big thing of it was that after World War II. There wasn't any real

Jewish influence the way there had been, say, in the 20s, in the Politburo, and then in the 30s in the NKVA Day. And there was also the fact that there was an affirmative action program from the very beginning in the the USSR which favored titular nationalities, particularly for higher education. So this meant that

if you were in Tashkan and you were an ethnic Uzbek, you got preference to go to the university in Tashkent. Now Jews were overrepresented greatly in Soviet universities, but it was kept to the level was not dominated completely because there was active discrimination in favor of Uzbeks and Uzbekistan, Ukrainians and Ukraine, Georgians and Georgia. So if you lived in your own national Soviet Social Republic, you got preference, particularly for higher education, but also for desirable jobs in the government, desirable jobs in industry positions in the local communist party and so this was always portrayed in the Western literature as discrimination against Jews because they said well you know majority of people go to the University of Tashkent must be ethnic Uzbeks we can't

have a majority of them being Jewish when Jews are only 4% of the population but the American Jews thought well no you know if we can If we can score the test tight enough, we should be able to have 100% of the positions in Uzbekistan and leave the Uzbeks with none. Wow. Yeah. Great attitude, especially when you consider the attitude in Israel since 1948, whereas it's like good luck getting anything good if you're not Jewish. You made the comment about them being Ashkenazis and the pogroms. Is that further? Is that further evidence just pointing to evidence that the initial revolution was funded by them? Funded by, I mean, I think you get some funding from it. Yeah, and I think a lot of the resentment against both the Tsarist Russian government,

as well as Russians in general and certain particular, the word in Russian, so Slovi, it means like a status. It's like an ethno-class status, but the Cossacks, they particularly did not like. And there is actually a mass extermination of Cossacks during the Russian Civil War when Lenin is still in charge, and you have Trotsky, Khamenev, and Zinovif in the Politburo. So the...

I wanted to go back to the pogroms for a second. Researchers like Dr. Matthew Raphael Johnson says that a lot of the times the pogroms were basically what would happen was, is that revolutionary Jews would start acting up and committing violence. And then, you know, like the Black Hundred or groups would come in to stop them. and then the Jewish own newspapers would be like, oh, look, they're just attacking Jews for no reason at all. Do you have any reason to believe that that would be? It's not my area of expertise. The person is now dead.

It's probably the best researcher on it was at, I believe he was at, he was at one of the University of London. I think it might have been Birkbeck, but John Clear, he wrote on it. And he said, you know, one of the myths, when you look at the archives of the Tsarist government, one of the myths that is clearly not true is the idea that the Tsarist government was instigating and supporting it. The Tsar's government had a very low opinion of the pogroms and tried to put a suppress some because it viewed it as chaos and anarchy that threatened their rule. So even while the Tsar's government was obviously no great lover of Jews, although it was always open under the Tsars.

If they converted to Russian orthodoxy, they were no longer considered to be Jewish. It wasn't an ethnic or racial classification until the Soviets took power ironically. And then it becomes one of the national... But interestingly, only Ashkenazis got the designation Javerets, which literally means Hebrew. So other groups, the Buharan Jews, for instance, or the Jews in the Caucasus, which are often called Tats, but I'm told that's a derogatory term.

So mountain Jews and Buharan Jews, these other Eastern Jews, they were considered separate ethnic groups from the Ashkenazi, which were classified as Hebrews. You mentioned the offering them to convert and immediately your mind goes to Spain. It seems like that's been, that was tried throughout the last 2,000 years is sure you can stay as long as you convert. And then, of course, Spain had the Morano problem. Well, yeah, Spain is a bit different. But there were some Jews that did convert. and become Christians, just as there were Muslims. In fact, there were a number of Tatar Muslims that converted to Christianity

and joined the Russian nobility after the Yvonne VIII took Kazan Hanate. So it certainly wasn't, at least the Tsar's government was in good faith. If you actually, you know, get baptized and become a member of the Russian Orthodox Church, right, then you are considered to be the same as any other Russian Orthodox Christian and the fact that you were born Jewish and have Jewish heritage becomes irrelevant. In the Soviet state, you couldn't change after, I believe, in 1938, you couldn't change your nationality legally. So if you had two Jewish parents would say Jew on your identification documents, you had two German parents would say German.

If you had a mix, you could choose one of those two at age 16, but not another. So if you were half German, half Polish, right, you could choose one of the two, but you're still going to be screwed. Well, let's finish up with this. the revolution, everything that happened afterwards. The revolution, the way that people like Yagoda treated Christians, treated Russians, was this all animosity for the last 600 years of Russian history, how they feel they were treated, the pale of settlement, Kemmetsky, Is that what this is that what?

I think that's part of the motivation for a number of them, particularly when you go on the lower levels. You start saying things like the decoulocization, where they're using open racial epithets against Germans and Poles. And this is in 1930 already, 1931. But I think you look at somebody like Kaganovic, while he never denied he was Jewish, I don't think he was being motivated by the fact he was Jewish ancestor.

I think he viewed himself as an international communist and a loyal supporter of Stalin, and he did what Stalin said. If necessary to bring socialism, we were going to have to be very violent, and certain ethnic groups weren't going to make it because they were inherently counter-revolutionary. And so the Volga Germans, the Crimean Tatars, the Chechens, these were all peoples that had proven themselves unable to integrate into socialism. so had to have forced to be used to help them along by destroying their organic compact settlements.

But I think when you have higher levels, it's more ideological. I think somebody like Trotsky, somebody like Kaganovic, even somebody like Yagoda, I don't think they were thinking I'm doing this to get back for the fact that the Russians and Ukrainians and other people engaged in pogrom. and other violence against Jews. But I think certainly since the party and apparatus is so large, when you get to the lower levels on the ground and the implementation, there is quite a bit of that.

It is interesting that there are so many revolutionary, so many groups of revolutionary thought in Russia. It just, it's, I mean, that's going to, the budding of heads is going to be incredible, because when those revolutionary groups, they're not backing down for anything. So it's either going to be, you know, except who I am and we're going to work to try to take over,

or are you going to have to kill us, basically? Well, yes, there was an extreme amount of violence. And then, of course, as violent as 1918 and 1921 was, and it led to famine in 21 and 22, which was particularly harsh. on the Germans in Volga and Ukraine. It became much more violent in the 1930s and 1940s. And so it's, as Stalin said,

do we want to compress the 100 years of industrialization, which involved, of course, a mass dislocation of people from the countryside into industrial factories in Great Britain. They want to compress that into 10 years, right, 1-10, which of course means that the suffering involved in that gets multiplied by a factor of at least 10. So I think these people were looking at, we want to accomplish creating an industrial, powerful, military, you know, super state along the lines of using the power of using the power of. of the state to basically bootstrap everything up. So everything is controlled by the state, which

is controlled by the Vanguard party, so that it has a clear trajectory. And of course, this was considered to be the it justify the means, right? That is, in reality, they were right, that the vast majority of the descendants of the survivors, at a much higher standard of living than their grandparents did. That is, by the time you get to the 1960s and 1970s,

there is a much, much higher standard of living, both materially but also culturally for people in the Soviet Union than existed under the Tsar. But to do that, you have at least 10% of the population violently killed, and of course, large numbers of people who weren't killed, you know, displaced to special settlements, sent to labor camps to work for years, deprived of basic human dignity and rights. So it becomes, you know, this injustice means by being very violent and oppressive, those who survive, right, physically aren't killed by this,

their descendants, their grandchildren will have a better standard of living than existed previous. The problem with this is countries that didn't go through this, like Western Europe and Japan and the United States, had even higher standards of living. Yeah. Well, I have two questions. One is in reference to what we've been talking about. The other one is going to be a little bit off the book. But like the Black Book of Communism.

throws out amazing numbers of dead by the hands of the government in the Soviet Union, whether actually executed or worked to death in a gulag. Do you have a number? Yeah. Oh, my personal number? Yeah. I would say I'm probably getting at, well, it depends what you include, but somewhere between 10 and 15 million.

But if we, it probably is not higher than that just because it's just not enough people, if you include the losses in World War Water, World War II for the demographics to make sense. It also turns out people are harder to kill than you would think. So if you remove all the food from Ukraine, it doesn't kill all of the Ukrainians. It kills about 15% in a period of two years, which is significant. But, you know, almost logically think, well, if nobody has any food, shouldn't all of them die? And yet somehow 85% of the population managed through various ways to just physically resist through survival to find enough food to eke out until that two-year period was out.

So it's amazing how bad conditions can get in things like, Soviet labor camp, even one north of the Arctic Circle, and people still physically survive. So I think this is one of the things that's not taking an account. But, you know, the Black Book of Communism, I would say the numbers in the chapter on the Soviet Union itself, and it verth, who was the French scholar, wrote that doesn't give a total figure. These figures are pretty accurate, I would say, overall. What got controversy was the 100 million figure by Quartot for all communist regimes. in the front of which 20 million were supposedly the USSR.

And then, of course, the big chunk is going to be China, particularly the famine after the Great Leap Forward, which is less direct than something like the Holodomor, where you have a targeted area being deliberately deprived of food for a couple of years. What's the numbers on the Holodomor? The official number from the Ukrainian government Now, I believe, at 3.8 million.

Okay. All right. So this was the last question I wanted to ask you. When you look at Israel today, how much do you think of what they're doing, especially when it comes to just seems like the extermination of populations has to do with that revolutionary spirit that you talked about, like the higher, you said some of the ones on the lower may have like animosity, but some of the higher have that revolutionary spirit, that socialist spirit. How much of that do you think carries over to what we're seeing today?

Well, I mean, in 48, there's what the Arabs call the Nakabah, which means catastrophe, where vast majority of the Arabic-speaking Christians and Muslims are forced out of their home, is forced out of what becomes the state of Israel in 48 into Jordan. the Gaza Strip, which is under Egyptian administration, Syria, Lebanon. The West Bank is annexed by Jordan, but a lot of the Palestinians refugees and expellees go there. Ben-Gurian certainly wanted to create a socialist Jewish state. The difference between the early left-wing socialist, Zionists, and the Soviets, was there was no pretense to any internationalism.

There was only going to be one nationality. There wasn't going to be any federation between different ethnic groups. It wasn't going to be, something like the Uzbek Soviet Social Republic, was never on the table for the Palestinians by people like Bangurian and others that were closer in their mindset to the Soviets than people like Jabotinsky, who was heavily influenced by Mussolini. But I think there is this idea that, yeah, it is kind of a creation of a revolutionary state in 48 that by creating the first modern Jewish state, the first state since the destruction of the second temple in 70 AD,

that the models to look at were successful socialist revolutions like the USSR, where the power of the state had managed to accomplish what, you know, we considered great things against great odds. And part of that of the ethnic angle that the Soviets had dealt very harshly with ethnic groups they considered to be enemy nations. And the Israelis viewed that as a positive model regarding the Arabs came under their control. but of course there are a number of key differences, particularly geography. There's no Siberia or Kazakhstan.

So they send them to, so they just kicked them out to the nearest Arab states bordering Israel. Yeah, it's interesting that Israel right now is, and from the start, is such an anachronism in that World War II is basically fought to destroy states like them and ethnic state. But one of the things I like to point out is that they may have an ethno state right now, but they're still multicultural. And they're multicultural within Judea, you know, the Jews there are multicultural. And that is a... Well, yeah, you know, my one trip to Israel, the one, because I was invited and they paid for everything, to give a paper on the neighbors of Jews in Central Asia. So I gave a paper on the deported German in Kazakhstan. But the one thing I kind of noticed was the only thing that held a lot of the various Jewish groups together in Israel was their opposition to the Arabs.

So the preferred language of everybody I was in contact with was Russian, not Hebrew. They used Hebrew to speak to other Israelis, but amongst themselves they use Russian. Right. and I think this is a pattern that has existed earlier with Moroccan Jews using Arabic, Yehmani Jews using Arabic, Iraqi Jews using Arabic, Persian Jews, obviously using a Farsi. But the thing is, you know, the Russian ones are so much larger, there's over a million of them. So they have for a consistently long time kind of resisted assimilation. That is, they'll go with the general Israeli.

opposition to the Arabs, but they're not giving up Russian for Hebrew. Yeah, that's really interesting that an ethno state that tries to bond itself based on the hatred of one people. I wonder who else in history has been accused of that. I don't know. I must be imagining it. Why does you tell everybody where they can find your work and support your work? Well, I have a book that. you can get off of Columbia University Press to use a great silence. I have a Patreon. It hasn't been too active recently because I haven't been doing any thing regarding it since for a while since I've been working a physical labor job. But currently I have an article I'll be writing for

a yearbook of the Ukrainian Studies Institute at University of Wostlov in Poland on Khrmian Tatars, their deportation 80 years ago. My last academic publication was at the end of last year, it was a chapter in a book on Russian Germans on four continents. I again wrote about Germans, afforded to Kazakhstan. But my email, j.a. uropole at gmail.com is connected to my PayPal. If anybody interested in sending me any money, if they really want to.

But the big thing for why I would like to come on as many shows as possible right now is my book has not done as well the last two years as I thought it should. Not that I care too much about the money from it, but I'd like people. to at least read it and because I spent probably better better chunk of more than 10 years doing all the research while I was in Kyrgyzstan and even Ghana and Iraq

so a lot of Soviet archives from Moscow some from Bishkek some from Tartu in Estonia and some from on the forced repatriation some from Washington, D.C., the role of the U.S. military enforcing ethnic Germans back to the Soviet Union to be sent to special settlements. So, yeah, I would, if you could buy my book and ask your local library to buy my book, that would be great. All right. I'm going to, I'll make sure to link to it in the show notes. Link to your substack, link to the Patreon, link to everything. All right. Thank you, Otto. I appreciate it. Thank you.