The Pete Quiñones Show - Reading Solzhenitsyn's '200 Years Together' w/ Dr. Matthew Raphael Johnson - Part 101-110

Episode Date: June 7, 2026

Dr. Matthew Raphael Johnson is a researcher, writer, and former professor of history and political science, specializing in Russian history and political ideology.Pete and Dr. Johnson start a project in which Pete reads Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's '200 Years Together," and Dr' Johnson provides commentary.Dr Johnson's Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/Fr_Raphael/aboutDr. Johnson's Radio Albion Page - https://www.radioalbion.com/search/label/Matt%20Johnson?&max-results=5THE ORTHODOX NATIONALIST - https://theorthodoxnationalist.wordpress.com/Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-pete-quinones-show--6071361/support.

I want to welcome everyone back to our reading of 200 years together by Alexander Solzhenison. This is episode 101. Dr. Johnson, how are you doing today? I promise I'll be on my best behavior. I promise you. It's going to be a struggle. It'll be a battle, an internal battle, but I think I could win this battle. So you have nothing to worry about.

All right. Here we go. New chapter, chapter 21. during the Soviet-German War. After Kristlnacht, 1938, the German Jews lost their last illusions about the mortal danger they were facing. With Hitler's campaign in Poland, the deadly storm headed east. Yet nobody expected that the beginning of the Soviet-German war would move Nazi politics to a new level, toward total physical extermination of Jews.

While they naturally expected all kinds of hardships from the German conquest, Soviet Jews could not envision the indiscriminate mass killings of men and women of all ages. One cannot foresee such things. Thus, the terrible and inescapable fate befell those who remained in the German occupied territories without a chance to resist. Lives ended abruptly, but before their death, they had to pass through either initial forced relocation to a Jewish ghetto or a forced labor camp or to gas vans or through digging one's own grave and stripping before execution. The Russian Jewish Encyclopedia gives many names of the Russian Jews who fell victims of the Jewish catastrophe.

It names of those who perished in Rostov, Smyroupil, Odessa, Minsk, Belostok, Khanas, and Narva. There were prominent people among them. The famous historian, S.M. Dubanov, spent the entire interwar period in exile. He left Berlin for Riga after Hitler took power. He was arrested during the German occupation and placed in a ghetto. In December 1941, he was included into a column of those to be executed. From Vilna, historian Dina Jofa, and director of the Jewish gymnasium, Joseph Yershinsky, were sent to concentration camps.

Both were killed in Treblinka in 1943. Rabbi Shmul Bespelov, head of the Hesedam movement in Bobrusk, was shot in 1941 when the city was captured by the Germans. Cantor Gershon Sorota, whose performance had once caught the attention of Nicholas II and who performed yearly in St. Petersburg and Moscow died in 1941 in Warsaw. There were two brothers, Paul and Vladimir Mintz. Paul, the elder, was a prominent Latvian politician, the only Jew in the government of Latvia. Vladimir was a surgeon who had been entrusted with the treatment of Lenin in 1918 after the assassination

attempt. From 1920, he lived in Latvia. In 1940, the Soviet occupation authorities arrested Paul Mintz and sent him to a camp in Krasnayr's cry where he died early on. The younger brother lived in Riga and was not touched. He died in 1941 at Buchenwald. Sabina, Schreerian, a doctor of medicine, psychoanalyst and close colleague of Carl Jung, returned to Russia in 1923 after working in clinics in Zurich, Munich, Berlin, and Geneva. In 1942, she was shot along with other Jews by Germans in her native Rostov-on-Don. In Chapter 19, we wrote about the death of her three scientists brothers during Stalin's terror.

Well, let me just say what I said to you before. It isn't uncommon among Russian nationalists, very good ones, to take this point of view, generally speaking. Sultan Isson, of course, was in the Soviet army, but the propaganda at the time was that he was in the Russian army. He was defending Russia. And that's how these men were motivated. I think it was just, you know, accepting this view comes from the sheer number of Russians, Belarusians, Ukrainians who were killed of all backgrounds. and started with this with the German invasion

mechanics of which I'd like to talk about at some point but in the fact that he was in Solzhenitsch was in the Soviet army that he was in a German POW camp he wasn't treated poorly as far as I know he never said he was so the traditional point of view of all of this

is accepted only because of what the invasion caused. It's not entirely, you know, it's not fully rational, but that's the cause of it. I mean, Belarus lost half of its population. I can't believe it. It took three decades to recover again.

So that makes some sense to me. and with this massive defeat, the Soviets experienced early on, they were able to come back. And, I mean, there was a reason for that, but that's always impressive to people. People like to hear those stories. So I think that's really where this comes from,

more than anything else. Yet many were saved from death by evacuation in 1941 and 1942. Various Jewish wartime and post-war. sources do not doubt the dynamism of this evacuation. The example in the Jewish world, the book written in 1944, one can read, The Soviet authorities were fully aware that the Jews were the most endangered part of the population, and despite the acute military needs in transport, thousands of trains were provided for their evacuation. In many cities, Jews were evacuated first, although the author believes that the statement of the Jewish writer David Bergelsen

that approximately 80% of Jews were successfully evacuated is an exaggeration. Berglson wrote, in Chernigov, the pre-war Jewish population was estimated as 70,000 people, and only 10,000 of them remained by the time the Germans arrived. And Denepp Propeutrovsk, I can never pronounce that one. Yeah, neither can. Out of the original Jewish population of 100,000, only 30,000 remained when the Germans took the city. in Jitsimir, out of 50,000 Jews, no less than 44,000 left. In the summer in 1946, issue of the Bulletin Hayasa, E.M. Kulisher wrote,

quote, there is no doubt that the Soviet authorities took special measures to evacuate the Jewish population or to facilitate its unassisted flight, along with the state personnel and industrial workers, Jews were given priority in the evacuation. The Soviet authorities provided thousands of trains specifically for the evacuation in Jews." Also, as a safer measure to avoid bombing raids, Jews were evacuated by thousands of haywagons, taken from Kolkos' and Sofkosk's collective farms,

and driven over to railway junctions in the rear. BT Goldberg, a son-in-law of Shalom al-lacham, and then a correspondent for the Jewish newspaper, Der Tog from New York, after a 1946-to-47 winter trip to the Soviet Union wrote an article about the wartime evacuation in Jews. Dirtog, February 21st, 1947. His sources in Ukraine,

Jews, quote, Jews and Christians and military and evacuees all stated that the policy of the authorities was to give the Jews a preference during evacuation to save as many of them as possible so that the Nazis would not destroy them. End quote. And Moshe Kaganovich, former Soviet partisan in his by then foreign memoir

SARS-1948 confirms that the Soviet government provided for the evacuation of Jews all available vehicles in addition to trains, including trains of hay wagons. And the orders were to evacuate first and foremost a citizenry of Jewish nationality from the areas threatened by the enemy. Note that S. Schwartz and later researchers, despite the existence of such orders, as well as the general policy of Soviet authorities, to evacuate Jews and such as such. as such. He disputes that. I don't know how, you know,

this paragraph is very important. It suggests that the Germans didn't have many Jews to worry about. In the major cities that they took in the early, you know, after June 13th, they were, there were a few Jews in the area. Now, I guess that they, what they did, they just brought them. to the interior, be on the urals or whatever. But can you imagine, you know,

thousands of trains just for their purposes. I thought Stalin hated them. I thought Stalin was this terrible anti-Semite. You know, these cities were depopulated to get them away from the German invasion. Oh, the Christians could go to hell, but these trains. And, you know, the truth is, and I tend to believe this because

Stalin was so far superior to Germany in material of all kinds, in tanks, in weapons, in trains, you know, he was able to afford this, you know. So Hitler didn't have much Jews to really worry about. But this, of course, tends to contradict his previous couple of chapters. And I mean, if you want any other proof that Stalin

was phylo-Semitic, well, here it is. You know, in the middle of wartime, would he say thousands of trains, hundreds of trains? My Lord. That's almost an obsession. Nevertheless, both earlier and later sources provide fairly consistent estimates of the number of Jews who were evacuated or fled without assistance from the German occupied territories. Official Soviet figures are not available. All researchers complain that the contemporaneous statistics are at best approximate.

Let us rely then on the works of the last decade. A demographer M. Kovetsky, who used formerly unavailable archival material and novel techniques of analysis, offers the following assessment. According to the 1939 census, 3,028,538 Jews lived in the USSR within its old, that is, pre-1939, 1940 boundaries. With some corrections to this figure and taking into account the rate of natural increase of the Jewish population from September 39 to June 1941, he analyzed each territory separately. This researcher suggests that at the outbreak of the war, approximately 3,080,000 Jews resided within the old USSR borders. of these 900,000 resided in the territories which would not be occupied by Germans, and at the beginning of the war, 2,180,000 Jews, Eastern Jews, resided in the territories

later occupied by the Germans. There was no exact data regarding the number of Jews who fled or were evacuated to the East before the German occupation, though based on some studies, we know that approximately 1 million to 1.1 million Jews managed to escape from the eastern regions later occupied by Germans. I think this is why Swartz makes the claim that, no, they weren't given preferential treatment because, you know, the records are spotty. So anything that we talk about here is an estimate.

It can be a well-educated estimate, but that's all it is. We don't have paperwork. But I think, and I think that that's Swartz's argument. I think it's a dishonest one. But because there aren't clear records, therefore Stalin's policy didn't exist. The truth of the matter is that they were given preferential treatment, as Schulteneutson said, and were removed from all of these cities in huge numbers to the interior of the Soviet Union. There was a different situation in the territories incorporated into the Soviet Union only in 1939 and 19149.

and which were rapidly captured by the Germans at the start of the Blitzkrieg. The lightning speed German attack allowed almost no chance for escape. Meanwhile, the Jewish population of these buffer zones numbered 1.885,000 Western Jews in June 1941. And only a small number of these Jews managed to escape or were evacuated. It is believed that the number is about 10 to 12 percent. Thus, within the new borders of the USSR, by the most optimistic assessments approximately two, 2.2 million, 200, 2,026,000 Jews, 2 million Eastern, 226,000 Western escaped the German occupation,

and 2.7,039,000 Jews, 1,080,000 Easterners, and 1,659,000 Westerners remained in the occupied territories. Well, and that's what I was, this is what I was kind of waiting for here. There was no Blitz Creek. Hitler was not capable of that. And when you read Suvorov, Suvanov, the best book isn't so much icebreaker. It's his 2008 book, The Main Corporate. Hitler was very, compared to the USSR, Hitler was very bad off, militarily speaking.

Typical German tank, and he had very few of them compared to the Soviets, had 100-horsepower engine. so which were using four and five hundred horsepower engines. I mean, the Panjah one only had machine guns. Panzer 2 had a 20 millimeter cannon that couldn't penetrate even small or light Soviet tanks. Panzer 3 and 37, and maybe they only had 75 of those at the time of the attack. Germany did not have a heavy tank at all. They said that it was one, but it wasn't. You know, the truth is, you know, they went into this battle.

Hitler's invading army had 3,332 tanks, many of which were like that, quite inferior. Stalin had 23,925. Among them the most advanced in the world, the powerful long-barrel cannons. wide treads for both road and snow conditions. Very advanced anti-tank weapons defenses. Diesel engines. All these improvements that Germany did not have. And Stalin was continually building them in huge numbers.

Suvadov reminds us that Hitler had... Stalin had more amphibious tanks than Hitler had tanks in total. But when I read his book, what blew me away is that this was really a horse-drawn invasion. Now, I've heard different estimates between 500,000 and 750,000 horses were dragging, you know, right behind there. Some of these tanks only existed on paper.

So-called Blitzkrieg was made up of convoys of maybe 220 horses with carts following each tank. You know, about 153 divisions invaded maybe 17 could be called armored in any normal standard and of course the Soviets were the exact opposite what kind of blitzkrieg can you have when you're dependent on horsepower literal horsepower this was no no blitzkrieg whatsoever

and this is one of the reasons that when Hitler he got news of this invasion Stalin laughed Stalin knew Hitler's military capabilities very well because some of it was developed on Soviet soil to get out of the, you know, Versailles restrictions. And they were still trading up until this point. This, you know, the main culprit absolutely blew my mind. Who she has plenty of citations for all of this stuff.

It blew my mind how bad off the German invasion was compared to what the Soviet Union had. They were not fast-moving. They couldn't be. and you didn't have, of course, you didn't have a long-range bomber. I think in 1941 Soviets had roughly 6.5 million men under arms. No one in the cosmos could ever believe that he was going to take the country in just a few weeks or a few months. It was a suicide mission.

Evacuies and refugees from the occupied and threatened territories were sent deep into the rear, with the majority of Jews resettled beyond the Ural Mountains, in particular in Western Siberia, and also in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan. The materials of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, E.A.K, contained the following statement, quote, at the beginning of the Patriotic War, about one and a half million Jews were evacuated to Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and other Central Asian republics. This figure does not include the Volga, the Ural, and the Siberian regions. However, the Jewish Encyclopedia argues that a 1.5 million figure is a great exaggeration.

Still, there was no organized evacuation into Bureau Bidzon, and no individual refugees relocated there, although because of the collapse of the Jewish Caucasus, the vacated housing there could accommodate up to 11,000 families. At the same time, the Jewish colonists in the Crimea were evacuated so much ahead of time that they were able to take with them all livestock and farm implements. Moreover, it is well known that in the spring of 1942, Jewish colonists from Ukraine established cocosis in the Volga region. How? While the author calls it the irony of nemesis, they were installed in place of German colonists who were exiled from the German Republic of the Volga by Soviet government, orders starting on August 28, 1941. one. All right. Well, let's be clear. And we've said this many times before. These were not necessarily

farmers. The tiny, minuscule minority of Jews that were farmers anywhere. But they did, you know, control in one way or another, the collective farms. But this is, you know, this is, it's impressive that there weren't that many Jews that were remaining. And this doesn't include, because of the nature of the record, you know, we could guess certain things, those who simply left on their own. They didn't wait for an official transport. They simply just left. So, but keep in mind something else, too, in what I was saying before, because Stalin was going to invade central Europe, he had a massive number of men, a material,

um, very close to the, that border, the border with Poland, the border with Romania, etc. And, and Hitler was able to use that stuff, especially the fuel and things like that, the huge, you know, whole armies that were captured early on. But even with that, well, it's very difficult to do because they're not comparable systems. But even with that, the initial invasion force stalled just before they got to Moscow, they simply couldn't do it. They were exhausted. They took heavy casualties. and as far as I know, and I think this is pretty well known,

Stalin practiced a scorched earth tactics. Stalin also announced that he wasn't going to follow the rules of war. He wasn't going to obey the rules of war here. So an invasion force under those conditions has to be briefed in a very different way. So that's the situation here with these, these so-called farmers and craftsmen. As already noted, all the cited wartime and post-war sources agree in recognizing the energy and the scale of the organized evacuation in Jews from the advancing German army.

But the later sources from the end of the 1940s began to challenge this. For example, we read in a 1960s source, quote, A planned evacuation of Jews as the most endangered part of the population did not take place anywhere in Russia, italicized as in the source. And 20 years later, we read this. After the German invasion of the Soviet Union, quote, contrary to the rumors that the government allegedly evacuated Jews from the areas under

imminent threat of German occupation, no such measures had ever taken place. The Jews were abandoned to their fate. When applied to the citizen of Jewish nationality, the celebrated proletarian internationalism was a dead letter. The statement is, this statement, this is back to Solzhenitsyn's talking, this statement is completely unfair. Keep in mind at this point, decades after the war is when the Stalin was an anti-Semite concept began to take off. I don't remember when that first flurry of articles and books in academia came out saying that, they had no choice but to deny this

and with the paucity of records they could say it and really it was very difficult to respond to them but contemporary sources from the era show otherwise it may not be the huge numbers that they say I don't know

but and this is not an argument that destroys this statement but the claim that Stalin was an anti-Semite you had this stuff couldn't have happened and they had to deny it or say it wasn't for Jews

like you know like Schwartz did even though they were they were the ones who'd they could benefit from it but it didn't say Jews on the side of the train and because of that well it's just for anybody you know

those aren't rumors as far as I know and the citations that Shultan Isan Isan gives and that I've come across over the years, you know, it is true. But trying to create Stalin and blame all of the tyranny of the Soviet Union on one man who, of course, is an anti-Semite, is what caused these kind of reactions much later. Still, even those Jewish writers who deny the beneficence of the government with respect to Jewish evacuation do recognize its magnitude. quote, due to the specific social structure of the Jewish population, the percentage of Jews among the evacuees should have been much higher than the percentage of Jews in the urban population, end quote. And indeed it was. The evacuation council was established on June 24, 1941, just two days after the German invasion. Schwernick was the chairman, and Kassigin and

Pervukin were his deputies. Its priorities were announced as the following. To evacuate first and foremost, the state and party agencies with personnel, industries, and raw materials, along with the workers of evacuated plants and their families and young people of conscription age. Between the beginning of the war and November 1941, around 12 million people were evacuated from the threatened areas to the rear. The number included, as we have seen, 1 million to 1.1 million Eastern Jews and more than 200,000 Western Jews from the soon-to-be occupied areas. In addition, we must add to this figure a substantial number of Jews among the people evacuated from the cities and regions of the Russian-Soviet-Federed Socialist Republic, R-F-S-F-S-R, that is Russia proper, that never fell to the Germans, in particular those from Moscow and Leningrad. Solomon Schwartz states, quote, the general evacuation of state agencies and industrial enterprises with a significant portion of their staff, often with families, was in many places very extensive.

thanks to the social structure of Ukrainian Jewry with a significant percentage of Jews among the middle and top civil servants, including the academic and technical intelligentsia and the substantial proportion of Jewish workers in Ukrainian heavy industry. The share of Jews among the evacuees was larger than their share in the urban and even more than in the total population. This is kind of how we know that it really did happen, regardless of what Schwartz has to say and what others have to say, because of their control of certain, of these, of these, of these industries and these regions. That's very important to, to keep in mind. I also think, you know, 12 million people, that's a huge number. And I think, let's say, let's say it's really 10 million.

I don't know, whatever the real number is, my personal theory is that Stalin and Beria were worried that they were all going to join the Germans. Of course, the Jews wouldn't. But, you know, Hitler had a tremendous Russian contingent that I don't think he treated very well. I have a paper that Eric Koch, the SS head of Ukraine, was actually working for Stalin. And I think it's true because of how he abused the allies and eventually turn them against them. as soon as the SS went in there it you know not combat SS the others

they ended up ruining it in certain places nevertheless you still had a substantial army of anti-Soviet Russians never properly used I think I think the most that Hitler ever gave was that they have they still have to

have a German officers, which would be odd, because I don't know if they all spoke German, but, um, and I think this is why he was getting people out of there. So, and I don't think he was worried so much about a, um, a German invasion as he was, um, his own invasion of, of central Europe getting, getting them out of there. And there's no blowback there. So, no, I do think it's true. I do think the number is probably correct. And another argument here, as we just said, that because of the Jewish presence in these heavy industries,

including railroads, yes, it's going to make sense. They're going to make sure that they get their people out of there as much as humanly possible. The same was true for Bailorussia. In the 1920s and early 1930s, it was almost exclusively Jews, but both young and old, who studied at various schools, courses, literacy classes in day schools, evening schools, and shift schools. This enabled the poor from Jewish villages to join the ranks of industrial workers. Constituting only 8.9% of the population of Belarusia, Jews accounted for 36% of the

industrial workers of the Republic in 1930. I think that's a very elastic definition of industrial workers. I think the percentage of guys who were actually there, you know, with a pick, or in a steel mill or a foundry were very low. But if they had a position just above them, they're still called industrial workers. In fact, Jews were all called proletarians as far as the Soviet system went, no matter what their position was.

So I find that 36% extremely hard to believe. but but but belarus was a huge jewish uh you know a tremendous even more than ukraine huge jewish population before the war the quote the rise of the percentage of jews among the evacuees continues as schwartz it was also facilitated by the fact that for many employees and workers the evacuation was not mandatory therefore many mostly non-jews remained where they were thus even the jews quote, who did not fit the criteria for mandatory evacuation, had better chances to evacuate, end quote. However, the author also notes that, quote, no government's orders or institutions on the

evacuation specifically of Jews or reports about it ever appeared in the Soviet press. There simply were no orders regarding the evacuation of Jews specifically. It means that there was no purposeful evacuation of Jews, end quote. Just because it didn't show up in the press doesn't mean anything. of course we all know that press was tightly controlled in Moscow no matter where it was in the Soviet Union it was controlled the Russians would have revolted

it would yeah yeah precisely it would have been an outrageous people would have been outraged being on belief exactly so they kept it out of the press keeping in mind the Soviet reality this conclusion seems ill grounded and in any case formalistic indeed reports about mass evacuation

of the Jews did not appear in the Soviet press. It is easy to understand why. First, after the pact with Germany, the Soviet Union suppressed information about Hitler's policies towards Jews, and when the war broke out, the bulk of the Soviet population did not know about the mortal danger of the German invasion posed for Jews.

Second, and this was probably the more important factor, German propaganda vigorously denounced Judeo-Bolshevism and the Soviet leadership undoubtedly realized that they gave a solid foundation to this, propaganda during the 1920s and 1930s. So how could they now deliver openly and loudly that the foremost government priority must be to save Jews?

This could only have been seen as playing into Hitler's hands. And that's another factor too. But one thing that Suvorov brings out, and it's very important, is that so much of his military, especially the heavier things, were built in the USSR. are, even right up to just prior to the invasion. That's one place he can go that they didn't have observers from, you know, from Western Europe to yell at them for. So, and so, and from, actually from the German side, it's very hard to condemn Judeo Bolivism while, God, they sold their most advanced battleship. So did the Italians.

So, although without guns. to the USSR, not that long before, before the invasion. And I don't have the name of it off the top of my head, but they weren't, you know, and it was, of course, Stalin's interest wasn't to support Germans or national socials or anything like that, but it was to make sure, I mean, his concern regardless was that Western European powers would wear themselves out. and although, of course, he didn't have to look very far because the Italians made sure that whatever they did, they needed rescue. So the Germans had to go there and rescue North Africa, in Greece. Everywhere they went, they lost, and they needed German assistance.

So wearing them out wasn't very, wasn't going to be very difficult, which is another reason why you didn't have a Blitzkrieg in 1941. you had what I would call a suicide mission. Therefore, there were no public announcements that among the evacuees, Jews were overrepresented. The evacuation orders did not mention Jews, yet during the evacuation the Jews were not discriminated against. On the contrary, they were evacuated by all available means, but in silence, without press coverage inside the USSR. However, propaganda for foreign consumption was a different matter. For example, in December 1941, after repulsing the German onslaught on Moscow, radio Moscow, not in the Russian language, of course, but in Polish.

And on the next day, five more times in German compared the successful Russian winter counteroffensive with the Maccabian miracle and told the German-speaking listeners repeatedly that precisely during Hanukkah week, the 134th Nuremberg division named after the city where the racial legislation originated, was destroyed. In 1941, the Soviet authorities readily permitted worshippers to overfill synagogues in Moscow, Leningrad, and Karkoff, and to openly celebrate the Jewish Passover of 1942. We cannot say that the domestic Soviet press treated German atrocities with silence. Ilya Erinberg and others, like the journalist Krieger, got the go-aheat,

to maintain and inflame hatred towards Germans throughout the entire war, and not without mentioning the burning topic of Jewish suffering, yet without a special stress on it. Throughout the war, Ehrenberg thundered that the German is a beast by his nature, calling for not sparing even unborn fascists, meaning the murder of pregnant German women. And he was checked only at the very end when the war reached the territory of Germany,

and it became clear that the army had embraced only too well the party line of unbridled revenge against all Germans. Yeah, revenge, of course, we know I don't think that's true. I understand Sultanitin's position. You know I've been a big critic of Putin primarily on that. That's the one big issue I have with him, how he just stresses this over and over again. But when Stalin rejected and publicly, in fact, stated the rules of war don't unapplied and my forces, this became a very different kind of a war.

This was going to be worse than World War I. And if you read various German memoirs of the era, you see exactly what it was. You see that the Soviets were always far better supplied than the Germans were even fairly close to the border. The only exception being when they took. these huge Soviet stores of ammunition, including things like food and uniforms. There's a lot of myths about this invasion that hopefully we could take care of here, even if it's not entirely appropriate.

However, there is no doubt that the Nazi policy of extermination of the Jews, its predetermination in scope, was not sufficiently covered by the Soviet press so that even the Jewish masses in the Soviet Union could hardly realize the extent. of their danger. Indeed, during the entire war, there were few public statements about the fate of Jews under German occupation. Stalin in his speech on November 6th, 1941, the 24th anniversary of the October Revolution said, quote, the Nazis are as eager to organize medieval Jewish programs as the Tsarist regime was. The Nazi party is the party of medieval reaction and the Black Hundred pogroms. As far as we know an Israeli historian writes, it was the only case during the entire war when Stalin publicly mentioned the Jews.

On January 6, 1942, in a note of the Narcomindal People's Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, composed by Molotov and addressed to all states that maintain diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, the Jews are mentioned as one of the many suffering Soviet nationalities and shootings of Jews in Kiev. Levov, Odessa, Kaminets Poldowsk, De Nepra Post, Vos, Maripal, Kirch were highlighted and the number of victims listed. Quote, the terrible massacre and pogroms were inflicted by German invaders in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine. A significant number of Jews, including women and children, were rounded up before the execution. All of them were stripped naked and beaten and then shot by submachine guns. Many mass murders occurred in other Ukrainian cities and these bloody executions. prosecutions were directed in particular against unarmed and defenseless Jews from the working class. On December 19th, 1942, the Soviet government issued a declaration that mentioned Hitler's special

plan for total extermination of the Jewish population in the occupied territories of Europe, end quote, and in Germany itself. Quote, although relatively small, the Jewish minority in the Soviet population suffered particularly hard from the savage bloodthirstiness of the Nazi monsters." End quote. But some sources point out that this declaration was somewhat forced. It came out two days after a similar declaration was made by the Western allies, and it was not republished in the Soviet press, as was always done during newspaper campaigns.

In 1943, out of seven reports of the Extraordinary State Commission for Investigation of Nazi atrocities, such as extermination of Soviet prisoners of war and the destruction of cultural artifacts of our country, only one report referred to the murder of Jews in the Stofferpool region near Minerlnai Vodi. And in March 1944 in Kiev, while making a speech about the suffering endured by Ukrainians under occupation, Khrushchev did not mention Jews at all. You know, it occurred to me, as I've been saying, you know, the German military development which really was not at the root of German redevelopment economically. Much of it took place in the USSR.

They were trading. It would be very difficult for the press to be blaring about German atrocities against Jews having just helped them build their military force, which means Stalin was aware that they did not have the capacity to take, even if they tried anything, which Stalin said was as inconceivable to take or keep

what's of anything. My opinion is that these Jews and others were evacuated because this was a staging area. You had something like 3 million men being masked on the western borders of the U.S. are, it creates such a tremendous disruption in economic life. We had to get them out of there.

That has more to do with it than any preparation or worry about a German invasion. That was absolutely out of the question as far as Stalin and his men were concerned. So, yes, it did happen, but for a very, very different reason. And it's also consistent. conceivable that Jews thought that a preemption was possible, as difficult as it would be, they just simply wanted to get out of there. But when you have this huge number of men, material tanks, everything, coming into the western areas, which is with Jewish areas, then the one thing you want to do is get out of there. I think that was the cause, not a worry about the German invasion.

Probably this is true. Indeed, the Soviet masses did not realize the scale of the Jewish catastrophe. Overall, this was our common fate to live under the impenetrable shell of the USSR and be ignorant of what was happening in the outside world. However, Soviet Jews could not be all that unaware about the events in Germany. In the mid-30s, the Soviet press wrote a lot about German anti-Semitism, a novel by Leon Fectwanger, the Oppenheim family and the movie based on the book, as well as another movie, Professor Mamlock, clearly demonstrated the dangers of Jews were facing.

following the programs of Kristallnach, Pravda published an editorial, quote, The Fascist, Butchers, and Cannibals in which had strongly condemned the Nazis. Quote, the whole civilized world watches with disgust and indignation the vicious massacre of the defenseless Jewish population by German fascists. With the same feelings, the Soviet people watched the dirty and bloody events in Germany, and the Soviet Union, along with the capitalists and landowners, all sources of anti-Semitism have been wiped out. then throughout the whole November,

Pravda printed daily on its front pages, reports such as Jewish programs in Germany, beastly vengeance on Jews, the war of protests around the world against the atrocities of the fascist thugs. Process rallies against anti-Jewish policies of Hitler were held in Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, Tbilski, Tbilski,

Minsk, Svardlosk, and Stalin. Pravda published a deed... Was there a city? called Stalin? I said there's probably Stalingrad. Oh, Stalingrad. Yes, there's a misprint.

Provda published a detailed account of the town hall meeting of the Moscow intelligentsia and the Great Hall of the Conservatory with speech was given by A.N. Tolstki, A. Kornichek, El Sobelov, people's artists,

a Soviet title, Signifying Prominence in the Arts, A.B. Goldenweiser, and S.M. Mekels, and also the text of a resolution, adopted at the meeting. Quote, we the representatives of the Moscow intelligentsia raise our voice in outrage and condemnation against the Nazi atrocities

and human acts of violence against the defenseless Jewish population of Germany's. The fascist beat up, maim, rape, kill and burn alive and broad daylight, people who are guilty only of belonging to the Jewish nation. The next day on November 29th, under the headline Soviet intelligentsia is outraged

by Jewish programs in Germany, Pravda produced a full coverage of rallies in other Soviet cities. So it was in the press, albeit maybe a little bit later. But prior to the invasion, they were condemning Germany while still trading with them, which gives it a tremendous amount of strength to the argument that Suvada makes, that they wanted to build up Germany to fight the West and then Stalin could take on probably all of Europe that would make sense if this were true

and the same thing was going on and as you know in the U.S. and Britain so you know these rallies I have the feeling were paid I have the feeling these were organized by the party. And we know the fact is that it wasn't merely by belonging to the Jewish nation or there were cases of that. You have to admit, Himmler said some bloodthirsty things. You know, I know this is off topic, but had Hitler won the war, I think that Himmler and the SS would have, he would have turned they would have turned on each other he created his own deep state so to speak

um it was a politician him was not him who did say you did have some people saying some nasty things well well hitler while hitler was um very friendly with ansonoff um and you know considered him like one of his greatest allies the s s was working behind his back um with the iron guard to undermine antonoff there's there's truth to this and and that's worth getting into at some point um but these slogans here um and part of it is projection remember the Soviets had just invaded the the Baltics they invaded Poland a few days after Germany did and of course the gulag camps were moved right wherever the Soviet Union was

and all their enemies were sent there. So, you know, Germany's biggest problem, I know this is, this is, Romania was their main source of fuel, which could be taken in just a few hours by the Soviets. But this kind of thing was not going to motivate Russian soldiers, which is why I think in the beginning it was kept out of the press. I get the impression that this was later in the, well, this he says in the mid-30s, so it's just before, but not during wartime. So either way, it works.

Although I'm not seeing numbers here, they don't talk about anything like, you know, well, things, okay, never mind. I have to be very careful here. I'm struggling. I'm struggling. I think this is a good place to stop, too. I'm struggling. Yeah. He's got it, however, and he's going to go into the,

we're switching to Ribbentrop Molotov pack, so we should save this for the next episode. Oh, boy. All right. Well, as I do at the end of every episode, please go to the show notes and go to the description on the video and donate to Dr. Johnson's work. If you want, please, another great way you can do that is by picking up his new book. And yeah, do that, please. And we'll be back in a few days for the next episode in this chapter.

Increasingly, I need your support. I may get injured by fighting cats. You never know what kind of business. I may incur from that is the last thing I need. So I appreciate you helping me out, my friend. No problem. So I'll see in a couple days. Thank you, Dr. Johnson.

All right, my friend. Bye-bye. I want to welcome everyone back to our reading of 200 years together by Alexander Solzhenyson. This is episode number 102. Dr. Johnson, how are you doing today? I think Rod Stewart's Maggie May should be banned from the air. I still think it caused the murders of those people up the street from me in New Jersey, but two weeks after I was born in 71.

I've mentioned this before. I think it should be banned. Also Neil Young. Anything New Young does is ridiculous since he can't sing, making a career on not being able to hit the proper notes. So other than that, though, and the fact that I've been wondering where mushrooms why anyone would have decided to eat a mushroom.

You know, let's look at this disgusting thing at the base of a tree. We know it's killed a few people before. Let's try as many as we can. Maybe it won't kill us this time. How that ever became a food? All these questions. As soon as I woke up this morning. But otherwise, otherwise, I'm doing very well.

The first person to milk a cow probably had a lot of personal issues. You would think. Yeah. All right, picking up where we left off last time. Here we go. However, from the moment of the signing of the Ribbentrop-Molatov pact in August of 1939, not only criticism of Nazi policies, but also any information about persecution of the Jews and European countries under German control vanished from the Soviet press. A lot of messages were reaching the Soviet Union through various channels, intelligence embassies,

Soviet journalists, an important source of information, was Jewish refugees who managed to cross the Soviet border. However, the Soviet media, including the Jewish press, maintains silence. Well, that would make sense because they were technically allied. And it's what I said last week about, you know, communist parties in Western Europe having to just swallow this. Or just not be funded by the USSR anymore and become Trotskyait or whatever. and of course you know that was this

this was a big thing if they're going to be a line however temporarily this is going to be whatever there was was going to be repressed in the Soviet press which is you know

again and that means that communists in the West under U.S. Soviet control had to say it wasn't happening either when the Soviet German war started and the topic of Nazi anti-Semitism was raised again,

many Jews considered it to be propaganda, argues a modern scholar, relying on the testimonies of the catastrophe survivors gathered over half a century. Quote, many Jews relied on their own life experience rather than on radio, books, and newspapers. The image of Germans did not change in the minds of most Jews since World War I, and back then the Jews considered the German regime to be one of the most tolerant to them. Many Jews remembered that during the German occupation in 1918, the Germans treated

Jews better than they treated the rest of the local population, and so the Jews were reassured. As a result, in 1941, a significant number of Jews remained in the occupied territories voluntarily. And even in 1942, according to the stories of witnesses, the Jews in Voronis, Rostov, Krasnodar, and other cities waited for the front to roll through their city and hope to continue their work as doctors and teachers, tailors and cobblers, which they believed were also needed. The Jews could not or would not evacuate for purely material reasons as well. Yes, the only time I've heard that stated is in this book, that there was an artificial reason why they didn't retreat. And it's because they already had a great view of Germans and that they even treated Jews better than everyone else

in the end of World War I. I don't know. I suppose that there's some truth to it. I have never come across it anywhere else but this book. While the Soviet press and radio censored the information about the atrocities committed by the occupiers against the Jews, the Yiddish newspaper, Ein Gait, Unity, the official publication of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, E.A.K. was a allowed to write about it openly from the summer of 1942. Apparently, the first step in the establishment of E.A.K. was a radio meeting in August 1941 of representatives of the Jewish people, S. Michaels, P. Marcus, J. Orenberg, S. Marshock, S. Eisenstein, and other celebrities participated. For propaganda purposes, it was broadcast to the U.S. and other allied countries.

quote, the effect on the Western public surpassed the most optimistic expectations of Moscow. In the allied countries, the Jewish organizations sprang up to raise funds for the needs of the Red Army. Their success prompted the Kremlin to establish a permanent Jewish committee in the Soviet Union. Quote, thus began the seven-year-long cooperation of the Soviet authorities with global Zionism. In my paper on which I still haven't sent you, I'm sorry, or maybe I did it, I just forgot on the Soviet sponsorship of Israel in 1948. This was the source of it. The connection between the USSR and Zionism was brief, and it came precisely from this.

It did not last long at all for very obvious reasons. The U.S. was in a much better position to finance them than the war-torn USSR was. but by 42, the war was going on. Now they had no reason. The pact was nullified. The development of the committee was a difficult process, heavily dependent on the attitudes of government. In September 1941, an influential former member of the Bund, Henrik Erlich, was released

from the prison to lead that organization. In 1917, Erlich had been a member of the notorious and then omnipotent executive Committee of the Petro-Soviet. Later, he emigrated to Poland, where he was captured by the Soviets in 1939. He and his comrade, Atler, who also used to be a member of the Bund, and was also a native of Poland, began preparing a project that aimed to mobilize international Jewish opinion with heavier participation of foreign rather than Soviet Jews. Quote, Polish Bund members were intoxicated by their freedom and increasingly acted audaciously. Evacuated. Evacuated. by Kuwibishev, Samara, along with the metropolitan bureaucracy, they contacted Western diplomatic

representatives who were relocated there as well, suggesting in particular to form a Jewish legion in the USA to fight on the Soviet-German front. The things have gone so far that the members of the Polish Bund began planning a trip to the West on their own. In addition, both Bund activists presumptuously assumed and did not hide it, that they could literally reform the Soviet political system. In December, 1941, both overreaching leaders of the committee were arrested. Erlick was hanged, Erlick hanged himself in prison, Alters was shot. Erlick didn't kill himself. I, at this point, when you had,

have Jews raising money there's a tremendous amount of cash there you know that you're already in serious trouble but the very fact that they could reform the Soviet system with Stalin and still in power between what 39 and 41 it's

kind of a ridiculous thing but don't forget the Bolshevik party came straight out of the Jewish Bund in not just in Russia but in the rest of Europe in in late 19th century even the early 20th century so and I could only assume this is the same

a bund Jewish labor bun whatever name it had at the time that always remained there and always remained an entirely Jewish party and it spawned the Bolsheviks so maybe they thought that they had a certain amount of authority

maybe they thought that they were you know it wouldn't be a huge problem. I mean, they were Marxists. They were Bolsheviks in a way. At the top of my head, I don't know what their specific reform system was, what their agenda was, but whatever it was, Stalin was irritated by it. Yet during the spring of 1942, the project of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was revived, and a meeting of the representatives of Jewish people was called forth.

again. A committee was elected, although this time exclusively from Soviet Jews. Solomon Mikuls became its chairman and Schachno Epstein. There he is. Stalin's eye in Jewish affairs and a former fanatical bundist and later a fanatical Czechist became its executive secretary. Among others, its members were authors David Berglson, Peretz Markish, Leibvittgo, and Dernister. Scientist Lena Stern and Frumpkin, a member of the academy. Poet Itzik Pfeffer became the vice president. The latter was a former Trotskyite who was pardoned because he composed odes dedicated to Stalin. He was an important NKVD agent. And as a proven secret agent, he was trusted with a trip to the West. That's all you had to do. It's like penance.

The task of this committee was the same to influence international public opinion and to appeal to the Jews all over the world, but in practice it appealed primarily to the American Jews, building up sympathy and raising financial aid for the Soviet Union. And it was the main reason for Michols and Feffer's trip to the United States in summer in 1943, which coincided with the dissolution of the common turn. It was a roaring success, triggering rallies in 14 cities across the U.S. 50,000 people rallied in New York City alone. I wonder why.

Mikuls and Feffer were received by former Zionist leader Haim Weizmann and by Albert Einstein. Yet behind the scenes, the committee was managed by Lozowski-Dridzo, the deputy head of the Soviet Information Bureau. The committee did not have offices in the Soviet Union and could not act independently. In fact, it was not so much a fundraising tool for the Red Army as an arm of pro-soviet propaganda abroad. And it clearly worked. Even at this early date, the German policy against the Jews really didn't,

at least in the mainstream narrative, didn't reach fruition until really, really end of the war. I remember, Albert Einstein was a Marxist. Not sure he was, he wasn't a Stalinist, though. But he certainly wasn't. Marxist, he certainly was a Leninist in one way or another, at least in his mind, because politically he was an idiot, regardless of anything else. And of course, he's going to go to the U.S. is where the money is. You know, at this point, the Soviet Union had been at war for, what,

two years, a year and a half, the U.S. was really the only place to go. And I guess by this point, the isolationist, you know, there was substantially, substantial national social support in the U.S. too in the early years of the war, even maybe just before the war started, that all was shut down. Keep in mind also that FDR tried to imprison his entire opposition. And I read that, you know, on Albert Fisher's book, who I had met just, you know, just before his death in New York City. Anybody, including congressman. He wanted to arrest them all. You know, well, you know, it wasn't even, wasn't even at war yet. But it was pretty clear who signed that they were on. So this raised a huge amount of money.

And it definitely influenced public opinion. And maybe it was even worse than all the, the German soldiers are beasts in World War I babies on bayonet kind of propaganda. It may have been even worse than that. Some Jewish authors argue that from the late 1930s, there was a covert but persistent removal of Jews from the highest ranks of Soviet leadership in all spheres of administration.

For instance, D. Shub writes that by 1943, not a single Jew remained among the top leadership of the NKVD, though there were still many Jews in the Commissariat of Trade, Industry, and Foods. There were also quite a few Jews, in the commissary to public education and in the foreign office. A modern researcher reaches a different conclusion based on the archival materials that became available in the 1990s.

Quote, during the 1940s, the role of Jews and punitive organs remained highly visible coming to the end only in the post-war years during the campaign against cosmopolitanism. This is a classic example of Johnson's law at work. It's never been contradicted. prior to the end of the USSR, and it took a while for those records to be gone through because they tried to mess up.

They tried to destroy some of them. I remember reading about that at the time. You could say this, you know, just prior to that or maybe just after that, and there's no one who would possibly contradict you. You don't know. But now these things come out, say, between 90 and 95, and finally there's a way to show, no, that's not true.

But you still have Jewish professors who believe that today, even though it's blatantly not true. No one wanted to believe. When those records, KGB, different departments came to light, no one wanted to believe it. Because it contradicted everything the American left was saying, not just about the Jews, but about anything about, but anything about the USSR.

It showed that, you know, McCarthy was right. That things were far worse than we had realized. The end of the Soviet Union was a catastrophe in many ways, but certainly when these records, when they were finally brought to order, I remember my Russian professor at there, Nebraska said that they were doing everything in their power to not someone's destroy them, but to put them out of water so no one can resorts them properly. So it took a little while.

But it proved the right wing again correct about the USSR in almost every way. However, there are no differences of opinion regarding the relatively large number of Jews in the top command positions in the army. The Jewish world reported that in the Red Army now, during the war, there are over 100 Jewish generals, and it provided a small randomly picked list of such generals, not including generals from the infantry. There were 17 names, ironically, Major General of Engineering Service, Frankl Neftia Aronovich, of Gulag, was also included. A quarter of a century later, another collection of documents confirmed that there were no less than 100 Jewish generals in the middle of the war and provided additional names.

However, that volume unfortunately omitted the supergeneral Lev Meckless, the closest and most trusted of Stalin's henchmen from 1937 and 1940. From 1941, he was ahead of the political administration of the Red Army. Red Army. Ten days after the start of the war, Meckles arrested a dozen of the highest generals of the Western Front. He is also infamous for his punitive measures during the Soviet Finnish War and then later at Kirch in the Crimea. So let's decode that.

These weren't generals in the normal sense of the term. What a normal person thinks a military general officer is. These were, there were political generals. The very same people who we talked about before who had to shadow high-ranking officers. They weren't strategists. They were there to make sure no one retreated. They were there to make sure that no orders contrary to Stalin were given

that killed a lot of people. And again, the Soviet Finnish War, punitive measures. So many Red soldiers wanted to retreat and get out of the freezing. They were killed. A huge portion of the Soviet soldiers killed both in that war and in World War II

were killed by these political forces, these commissars. attached to the army. So they weren't generals in that sense of the term. Political administration of the Red Army, that's not military.

Political administration is the force of the party over the army, which of course is connected to the state. And far more than a dozen ended up being arrested as time went on. So your political commissars were led by him.

And we talked about them already. So these aren't military men. So you got to be careful. It's a different reality there. You can't, they say, oh, there's all these Jewish generals. Well, no, sort of. They had that rank. But they were civilians.

They were there as members of the party, making sure that high-ranking officers and the Red Army did what they were told. The short Jewish encyclopedia provides an additional list of 15 Jewish generals. Recently, an Israeli researcher had published a list of Jewish generals and admirals, including those who obtained the rank during the war. Altogether, there were 270 generals and admirals. This is not only not a few. This is an immense number indeed.

He also notes four wartime narcoms, In addition to Kaganovish, there were Boris Vanikov ammunition, Semyon Ginsburg, construction, Isaac Zaltzman, tank industry, and several heads of main military administrations of the Red Army. The list also contains the names of four Jewish Army commanders, commanders of 23 corps, 72 divisions, and 103 brigades. So even there, you see that they're not... They're not at the front. You know, they're not normal military strategists.

They're not doing what Zukov did. The tank industry, construction, overseeing ammunition. Remember, the entire thing was state-controlled. I mean, there was no private sector like in the Western world. And so there were so-called civilian generals, like you had the old Russian Empire. after Peter you had military ranks given to civilians as they rose in the bureaucracy in St. Petersburg. It's the only thing that America has connected to that

is the rank of colonel given to civilians in Kentucky. I think it's the only place. It's purely honorary. So there were generals, I guess. There were generals of a sort. In no army of the Allies, not even in the U.S.As, did Jews occupy such high positions as in the Soviet army? Dr. I. Arid writes, no, the displacement of Jews from the top posts during the war did not happen, nor had any supplanting yet manifested itself in general aspects of Soviet life. In 1944 in the USA, a famous socialist Mark Vichanak stated that not even hardcore enemies of the U.S.

and say that its government cultivates anti-Semitism. Back then, it was undoubtedly true. Yeah, with back then being in italics, meaning that it will happen in the future, which is also iffy. The immediate immediate future anyway. What was I going to say here? Yeah, well, that's all I wanted to say.

If Stalin were so anti-Semitic, would he ever want to say? want this army of general, civilian or otherwise, controlling the movement of major units. Absolutely not. How did they get past the so-called purge? You know, so he wasn't. He clearly wasn't. And there's every paragraph has more evidence as to how that was not true.

and yet I, you know, I still remember in the Nebraska, University of Nebraska Love Library seeing book after book on someone's anti-Semitism, you know, it became a mantra, and it's simply not true, and it's still believed today. According to Enochite from February 24, 1945, almost at the end of the war, for courage and heroism in combat, 63,374 Jews were awarded orders and medals, and 59 Jews became the heroes of the Soviet Union. According to the Warsaw-Yiddish-language newspaper Volkhtim, in 1963, the number of Jews awarded military declarations in World War II was 160,772, with 108 heroes of the Soviet Union among them.

In the early 1990s, an Israeli author provided a list of names with dates in confirmation, in which 135 Jews are listed as heroes of the Soviet Union. and 12 Jews are listed as the full Chevaliers of the Order of Glory. We find similar information in the three-volume essays on Jewish heroism. And finally, the latest archival research, 2001, provides the following figures, quote, throughout the war, 123,822 Jews were awarded military declarations, end quote. Thus, among all nationalities of the Soviet Union, the Jews are in fifth place among the recipients of decorations after Russians, Ukrainians, Bailovarcians, and Tartars.

Well, I'm going to repeat myself, but we don't know how they defined heroism. There's specific standards in the U.S. for a Medal of Honor. I had the feeling that any political general, any political colonel, had a much broader. It's like now it's like the bronze star among a, the U.S. military today. I don't even know what it means anymore. Everyone gets it, it seems. If you run the copier for without a problem for a year,

you get a non-valor bronze star. So it is, you know, I think I have the feeling this was simply stretched. I'm not saying that they weren't, they had good combatants. I'm sure they did. I'm sure they had a bunch of them. But I have the feeling that concept, heroism was the definition was very, very broad at the time. Arid states said anti-Semitism as an obstacle for Jews in their military careers in promotion

to higher military ranks in insignia did not exist in the Soviet army during the war. Production on the home front for the needs of the war was also highly rewarded. A huge influx of Soviet Jews into science and technology during the 1930s had borne its fruit during the war. Many Jews worked on the design of new types of armaments and instruments, and instrumentation in the manufacturing of warplanes, tanks, and ships in scientific research, construction, and development of industrial enterprises, in power engineering, metallurgy, and transport. For their work from 1941 to 1945 in support of the front, 180,000 Jews were awarded decorations. Among them were scientists, engineers, administrators, of various managerial levels,

and workers, including more than 200,000 who were awarded the order of two, two, I'm sorry, including more than 200 who were awarded the Order of Lenin. Nearly 300 Jews were awarded the Stalin Prize in Science and Technology. During the war, 12 Jews became heroes of socialist labor. Eight Jews became full members of the Academy of Science and Physics and Mathematics, chemistry and technology, and 13 became member correspondence of the Academy. me. The gulf in quality between Germany and the USSR was massive to begin with. I was raised to think that the Germans were far superior to the Soviet. It simply wasn't true.

The exact opposite was true. And not just in quality, but in quantity, as we've discussed already. Germany didn't really get the memo and the production of the heavy tank and a true heavy bomber not what they called it long distance bomber only began in 1944 it's almost like they forgot they were at war

and yet the Soviets were continually increasing their knowledge and putting out superior equipment to the point where the German equipment simply it just wasn't working anymore. We have to come to some version of the concept that it was a suicide mission. And this is why Stalin was so shocked. I mean, they knew, the Soviets knew German military capacity very well. And the Soviets had far superior everything. than the Germans did.

And I'm reading over and over again that it wasn't until 1944 that the Germans decided to start catching up. Yeah, the war was over by then, of course, as we all know, is, you know, it is a huge shock. But of course, a lot of this information came from the West. I probably all of it initially started from the West, and they just built on it. They just reverse engineered it, and they built on it.

They built on it very well. Hitler, I mean, even in mind calm, Hitler says that there's no chance of any Russian invasion of the Soviet Union. Even there, he says it. It's simply too large. It's too muddy. It's too cold. I mean, they're Germans. They didn't really bother them too much.

It's a big myth to say that the cold defeated the Germans. Most of the Soviet victories were done in other seasons. the mud again that affected the Soviets too but they were building things where that simply didn't matter anymore by the end of the war in the USSR

and that's why the medals were given so from purely a military technology standpoint it was deserved just purely from that standpoint So, you know, it took a while. The only reason that Hitler was able to maintain any kind of forward momentum was because he was able to capture the Soviet invasion equipment. Very quickly in a very, you know, surprised attack. No one thought that he was going to invade anything.

General Gugorovic, of course, ended up in a mental assessment. asylum for claiming that, ended up being dumped in America, where he wrote a book where he said, yeah, that's exactly what happened. And then just outside of Moscow, General Holder said, we run out of everything. We can't go anymore. Everything is critical low levels. You know, there were no one, no one in Germany, no one in the universe ever thought that this is going to be a quick victory. No one. And yet so much. much of mainstream history. You know, your history buffs,

you know, the warmer types in their dens. They think that this was the case. The snow destroyed the Germans and everything. It's just, it's just, none of it. None of it is true. Hitler had no chance.

And he was aware of it. And the fact that has taken all these years to finally come to light and all the diaries of the German generals saying that we don't have a chance here, even early on, and that it,

the Moscow wasn't taken, not because, you know, they simply couldn't move anymore. German tanks were so inferior. They couldn't go very long with a lot of repairs, a lot of spare parts. They were using some old Soviet equipment too. So now you had that problem.

They weren't used to it. So, you know, it was a mess. It was not a blitzkrieg, as we talked about before. The Soviets were capable of a blitzkrieg. We know that they did it in Mongolia against the Japanese. And the Japanese were never defeated to that extent anywhere. Even in Finland, I know this is a little bit off topic, but in Finland, the Soviets weren't defeated there. I mean, they eventually won.

But the Mannheim line was considered to be impenetrable. by every military strategist in the universe. And yet they breached it. So even there, anyone who knew anything realized that this was an army that no one could defeat. And as they grew in numbers, 5 million, 6 million, and at the end of the war, even more than that, their production was extraordinary.

Germany didn't have the planes to bomb anything. They had no long range. Bombers really ever. So they were able to produce right up and out in the open. A huge number of new tanks and everything. There was simply no chance. It was, in one way or another, it was a suicide mission. Many authors, including S. Schwartz, note that the role of Jews in the war was systematically concealed,

along with the deliberate policy of silence about the role of Jews and the war. He cites as proof the work of prominent Soviet writers such as K. Siamen, Jiminoff, Days and Nights, and V. Grossman, the people is immortal, where, amongst a vast number of surnames of soldiers, officers, political officers, and others, there is not a single Jewish name. Of course, this was due to censoring restrictions, especially in the case of Grossman. Later, military personnel with Jewish names reappeared in Grossman's essays. Another author notes that postcards depicting a distinguished submarine commander, Israel Fassanovic were sold

widely throughout the Soviet Union. Later, such publications were extended, and an Israeli researcher lists another 12 Jews, heroes of the Soviet Union, whose portraits were mass reproduced on postal envelopes. You know, if you've read enough Solomon Schwartz as I have, you realize that he's just, he's hysterical. Even though he provides some useful information,

he just is dedicated to the idea that everyone in the universe hated the Jews. And he was going to make sure that was the case. But at this point, anything he said in that regard was simply not true. Even though I'm a veteran of that war, I have not researched it through books much, nor was I collecting materials or have written anything about it. but I saw Jews on the front. I knew brave men among them. For instance, I especially want to mention two fearless anti-tank fighters.

One of them was my university friend, Lieutenant Emmanuel Mazen. Another was young ex-student soldier, Borya Gamorov. Both were wounded in action. In my battery among 60 people, two were Jews. Sergeant Ilya Solomon, who fought very well through the whole war and private Pugach, who soon slipped away to the political division. department. Uh-oh.

Another 20 officers of our, among 20 officers of our division, one was a Jew, Major Arzon, the head of the supply department. Poet Boris Sletsky was a real soldier. He used to say, I'm full of bullet holes. Major Lev Kupolev, even though he served in the political department of the army, responsible for counterpropagent aimed at enemy troops, he fearlessly threw himself in every possible fighting melee. A former Semyon Freela, a brave officer, remembers the war began, so I was off to the draft board and joined the army, without graduating from the university, as we felt to shame not to share the hardships of millions.

Or take Lazare, Lazarev, later a well-known literary critic who, as a young man fought at the front for two years until both his hands were mauled. It was our duty and we would have been ashamed to evade it. It was life. The only possible one under the circumstances, the only decent one for the people of my age and education. Boris Izraevich Fenerman wrote in 1989 in response to an article in book review that as a 17-year-old, he volunteered in July 1941 for an infantry regiment. In October, his both legs were wounded and he was taken prisoner of war. He escaped and walked out of the enemy's encirclement on crutches. Then, of course, he was imprisoned for treason.

But in 1943, he managed to get out of the camp by joining a penal platoon. He fought there and later became a machine gunner of the assault infantry unit in a tank regiment and was wounded two more times. Well, German military hospitals took care of everybody. That's your classic Red Cross. You know, that's the rules of war. Stalin refused and rejected the rules. of war. I don't deny anything he's saying in here.

This is, he saw it. I wasn't there. You weren't there. None of us were there pretty much. That, that, that generation is gone pretty much, almost, almost entirely. Then it's the same thing for Shultzhenits. Any contact with the Germans, you were automatically imprisoned for, for treason or contamination or something like that. and that's where it began for for Sultan Eastern and many other people but but of course you had Jews and they had motivation despite the censorship over

over what was happening in the Third Reich it didn't matter they knew I mean Jews are very very well organized and are connected especially through the Yiddish language Germany and Western Europe and the US they knew you know what was going on

at least they were with what they were being told. And so they had every reason to join. But I'm intrigued by this. He managed to get out of the camp by joining a penal platoon. It sounds like they gave him a choice that this was like a certain kind of punishment. And then he graduated from that and went back to the army again. but remember throughout all this the party was watching through their through their commissars and that's why and they had a tendency to exaggerate make themselves more valuable despite the fact that many things that they said caused a lot of men to be killed so so but I deny nothing that he says here there's no way to We can find many examples of combat sacrifice in the biographical volumes of the most recent Russian Jewish encyclopedia.

Schik Kordonski, a commander of mine and torpedo regiment, smashed his burning plane into the enemy cargo ship. He was posthumously made a hero of the Soviet Union. Wolf Korsunsky navigator of the Air Regiment became a hero of the Soviet Union too. Victor Hussin, a hero of the Soviet Union squadron commander, participated in the warzunskyi, 257 air skirmishes, personally shot down a number of the enemy's airplane, destroyed another tent on the ground. He was shot down over the enemy occupied territory and spent several days reaching and crossing the front lines. He died in a hospital from his wounds. One cannot express it better. The encyclopedia contains several dozen names of Jews who died in combat.

Yeah, I don't think anyone denies this. You know, they certainly had motivation. Germany had air superiority for maybe five minutes in the war. The Soviet fighters, the axon down, were superior to what the Germans had. Their best pilots were gone in 1940. And remember, as this is all going on, Britain is bombing Berlin. You know, it's, it's, you know, but as far as Jews in the front, there's no question. There's no question. And, you know, we have no reason to doubt any of this.

Yet, despite these examples of unquestioned courage, a Jewish scholar bitterly notes, quote, the widespread belief in the army and in the rear that Jews avoided the combat units. This is a noxious and painful spot. But if you wish to ignore the painful spots, do not attempt to write a book about ordeals that were endured together. But, you know, he's making a distinction between combat units on the one hand and political units on the other hand. It's not so much they avoided the Army, they avoided the military, they avoided the war. There is a sense that, of course, there were plenty in combat units, but overwhelmingly they were in the political units that pretty much everyone hated.

And the people who lined up behind them, to keep them from retreating, they were not considered combat units too. So there's a little bit of truth to that. In history, mutual national perceptions do count. During the last war, anti-Semitism and Russia increased significantly. Jews were unjustly accused of evasion of military service and in particular of evasion a front-line service. That's quoting. It was another quote, it was often said about Jews that instead of fighting, they stormed the cities of Alma Ada and Tashkent.

End quote. Here's a testimony of a Polish Jew who fought in the Red Army. In the army, young and old had been trying to convince me that there was not a single Jew on the front. we've got to fight for them. I was told in a friendly manner. You're crazy. All your people are safely sitting at home. How come you were here on the front?

Arid writes, quote, expressions such as we are at the front and the Jews are in Tashkent, one never sees a Jew at the front line could be heard among soldiers and civilians alike. Solzhenitsyn speaking, I testify, yes. One could hear this among the soldiers on the front. and right after the war, who has not experienced that? A painful feeling remained among our Slavs and our Jews could have acted in that war in a more self-sacrificing manner, that among the lower ranks on the fronts, the Jews could have been more represented.

Yeah. These feelings are easy to blame, and they are blamed indeed on unwarranted Russian anti-Semitism. However, many sources blame that on... the German propaganda digested by our public. What a people. They are good only to absorb propaganda, be it Stalin's or Hitler's, and they're good for nothing else. Now that it has half a century past since then, isn't it time to unscramble the issue? Yeah, we haven't even touched on the partisans where they were almost, you know, at least majority Jewish, but they were Irregulars.

The Germans had certain irregular as well. They had no choice. You had units that were dedicated, as we know, their name, to dealing with the irregulars, the partisans, and they caused a lot of trouble. Now, the Slavs, and there were many of them who joined the German cause, one of their main roles was to be used against the partisans. They knew the area and the language for more. And if you go back in my lecture on La Cotte,

the German experimental, national social experimental community, where they actually are providing soldiers for that, get into this in more detail. We haven't even touched the partisans, but technically they were. were members of the Army. There's no official data available on the ethnic composition of the Soviet Army during the Second World War. Therefore, most studies on Jewish participation in the war provide only estimates, often without citation of sources or explanation of the methods of calculation.

However, we can say that the 500,000 figure has been firmly established in the 1990s. The Jewish, quote, the Jewish people supplied the Red Army with nearly 500,000 soldiers. During World War II, 550,000 Jews served in the Red Army. The short Jewish encyclopedia notes that only in the field force of the Soviet Army alone were there over 500,000 Jews and that these figures do not include Jewish partisans who fought against Nazi Germany. The same figures are cited in the essays on Jewish heroism in Abramovich's book in the deciding war and in other sources. This is about maybe the 15th time since we started this, that I make a comment and that precise comment is mentioned again in the next paragraph.

I haven't read ahead here. I don't know what to make of that, but it happens a lot. But the partisans, yeah, they were Jewish units, you know, again, as motivated as anyone else. It wasn't like fighting for the Israeli, even though now they don't want to fight for Israel. but you had given what they knew about Hitler, they had motivation to fight. Unlike in previous wars with the Tsar,

they had no motivation to fight for Zora Nicholas or anyone else. We came across only one author who attempted to justify his assessment by providing readers with details of his reasoning. It was an Israeli searcher, I. Arad, in his the above-sighted book on the catastrophe. Arad concludes that the total number of Jews who fought in the ranks of the Soviet army against the German Nazis was no less than 420 to 430,000. He includes in this number the thousands of Jewish partisans who fought against the German invaders

in the woods. They were later incorporated into the regular army in 1944 after the liberation of Western Bilurisia and Western Ukraine. At the same time, Arad believes that during the war, approximately 25,000 to 30,000 Jewish partisans operated in the occupied areas of the Soviet Union. The Israeli encyclopedia in the article anti-Nazi resistance provides a lower estimate. In the Soviet Union, more than 15,000 Jews fought against the Nazis in the underground organizations and partisan units. In his calculations, Arad assumes that the proportion of mobilized Jews was the same as the average percentage of mobilized Jews. for the entire population of the USSR during the war, i.e. 13 to 13.5%. This would yield 390,000

to 405,000 Eastern Jews out of the total of slightly more than 3 million, save for the fact that in certain areas of Ukraine and Belarusia, the percentage of Jewish population was very high. These people were not mobilized because the region was quickly captured by the Germans. However, the author assumes that in general, the mobilization's shortfall of the Eastern Jews was small, and that before the Germans came, the majority of males in military age were still mobilized. And thus he settles on the number of 370,000 to 380,000 Eastern Jews who served in the Army. Regarding Western Jews, Arid reminds us that in 1940 in Western Belarusia and Western Ukraine, during the mobilization of conscripts,

whose year of birth fell between 19 and 22, approximately 30,000 Jewish youths were enlisted, but the Soviet government considered the soldiers from the newly annexed Western regions as unreliable. Therefore, almost all of them were transferred to the labor army after the war began. By the end of 1943, the process of remobilization of those who were previously transferred into the labor army began, and there were Jews among them. The author mentions that 6,000 to 7,000 Western Jewish refugees fought in the National Baltic Divisions. By adding the Jewish partisans incorporated into the Army in 1944, the author concludes,

we can establish at least 50,000 Jews from the territories annexed to the USSR, including those mobilized before the war served in the Red Army. Thus, I. Ayrid comes to the overall number of 420,000 to 430,000 Jews in military service between 1941 and 1941. And I'm assuming that he's counting political commissars. What's the name? What's the name for them? Those who forbade retreat. My memory is always so bad.

Yolkim Hoffman talks about them quite often. Whether that counts as combat service, I don't know. But being a member of the Army and being a fighter are two different things. Again, they had a motivation. But again, infantry was needed, even though I think by, by 1943, you're talking about maybe 9 million underarms in the USSR. And they had more if they needed it. Germany had no chance here. They needed them out of their labor.

And Stalin had such a strict consideration. These Western Jews weren't in the U.S.S. are very long. And he had a strict conception of who was reliable and who wasn't. But when he needed them, they were mobilized. And Hitler really didn't get the most out of the huge number of sloughs who wanted to fight for him, or wanted to fight against Stalin, I should say. he didn't use them properly I always said that that lost them the war

but they had no chance to begin with it was just very poor decision making and it wasn't so much the military military loved them you're typical you know the infantry but the SS higher ranks these groups

saw them as as a problem and that's this is why you know you know the the um the the uh germans didn't get as much out of the slavs who wanted to fight for them as they could have i don't know if that would have just extended the war a little bit on the eastern front but um but this was you know mobilization he had so much to work with and he the equipment was coming off the the assembly lines um you know you know 30,000

tanks by this point and with so much more coming and all as we mentioned before these technological improvements there was no doubt and once they were able to push the Germans out and take Romania well there's their fuel source and

you know I think things would have been different if Mussolini who whose antics I call them antics led to Germans having to rescue them at least twice and taking certain losses, potentially in armor in North Africa and in Greece,

which was a, you know, I've always told people that when, when I told my, you know, I told my students, I said when Fassie Italy fell

in 1943 that was a victory for Germany, not for, not for the Allies. According to Ared, the number of 500,000 soldiers commonly used in the sources would imply a general base. 500,000 conscripts taken out of the entire Jewish population of 3.7 to 3.85 million people. According to the above-mentioned sources, the maximum estimate for the total number of Eastern and Western Jews who escaped the German occupation was 2,226,000. And even if we were to add to this base all 1,000, 1,000.

million 80,000 Eastern Jews remained under the occupation, as though they had time to supply the army with all the people of military age right before the arrival of Germans, which was not the case. The base would still lack a half a million people. It would have also meant that the success of the evacuation discussed above was strongly underestimated. There is no such contradiction in Arad's assessment, and though its individual components may require correction overall, it's surprisingly well matches with the hitherto unpublished data of the Institute of the Military History derived from the sources of the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense. According to that data, the numbers of mobilized personnel during the Great Patriotic War were as follows.

Russians, 19,650,000. Ukrainians, 5,320,000. Bialuracians, 964, Tartars, 511,000, Jews, 434,000. and Kazakhs 3401,000, Uzbex, 330,000, others, 2.5 million. 19 million. Did Hitler not know the population of the USSR? Was he unaware of what they were capable? I mean, there was no way.

You know, it's better than an invasion of Central Europe, I guess, and certainly an invasion of Romania, which would have cut off Hitler's fuel oil supply. But my lord, I mean, he must, you know, but 19 million, it was just, it's shocking. Plus, with far superior equipment and the Germans lost air superiority right away. It's just that the war was over by the end of 41, as far as I'm concerned. This was just a meat grinder for both sides too. but don't forget

a lot of the Soviet casualties came from within it came from executions it came from the political commissars it came from anyone trying to retreat considered a coward if you read Yoakim Hoffman's book Salon's War of Extermination which I highly

highly highly recommend Willis Cardo actually gave that to me as a gift a years ago you'll see exactly these numbers He doesn't differ that much from these. But it was well aware of the fact that there was no chance of victory.

There couldn't have been. Not with these numbers. What do you think was going to happen? And not just defeat them. He did that early on, but to keep it. He said it many times. General Halter said it many times. And that alone shows me that,

that there was another motive and that other motive was that Stalin was planning an invasion of Europe and I think at this point it's irrefutable it's only the boomers who reject it because it's absolutely irrefutable everything that we know

about Stalin's policies destroying all of his defensive things the Stalin line and putting everything up front in a Soviet military doctrine as such has no defensive conception it doesn't exist. It's entirely offensive.

So whenever they are, you know, you have, you know, three, six million men on someone's border. They're there for offense. And they don't have permanent barracks. You have massive fuel and ammunition depots there. It was only one reason for it. Because there was no conception of defense in Soviet military doctrine, it was all offense. You know, that's what they were going to do. And that caused Operation Bavarosa. One more paragraph, and we're done here, this little paragraph. Thus, contrary to the popular

relief, the number of Jews in the Red Army in World War II was proportional to the size of mobilization base of the Jewish population. The fraction of Jews that participated in the war in general matches their proportion in the population. Well, I have no reason to deny it. we know that that would never have been the case under the monarchy. I honestly don't know how that worked. I mean, there's so few Jews left in Russia today that like 0.03% of the population is really irrelevant. But, you know, I have no reason to deny this list.

And I remember as a kid, and my father, remember the time life books? You send a series. You get the whole series of World War II. The whole series on World War II. They're great, actually. They're pretty well balanced as far as the reporting on a lot of them. It must have been, what, 20 volumes?

I have like six or seven, yeah. My dad had the whole thing. I must have been in third or fourth grade, and I absolutely devoured them. I devoured them. And so I was always, destined to do this, I guess. But I read these, you know, for pleasure.

This was something that I really wanted to learn about. And because I wasn't doing my school work, I got into a certain amount of trouble. But I was doing something else. I don't remember, you know, but a lot of that stuff, you know, this is what the early 80s now, a lot of the things that are mentioned

and there was an entire volume on Blitzkrieg, which I think now is out of date. Certain facts that simply aren't true. If for no other reason, then if they were pretty good. I do agree with you. They were pretty good. So many pictures. You get to see all the horses.

I can't even envision 750,000 horses. But all the different uniforms, all the different units. For, you know, someone in third grade, fourth grade you know it's extraordinary it was very exciting and far better than the war movie like the big red one was being put out at the time

but still you know some of it is simply now it's simply not true because that was prior to the fall of the USSR that was prior to these documents being made available but again

I have no reason to deny this breakdown in terms of numbers. But look at this. Look at the numbers against Hitler's forces that were already exhausted. This is, it's extraordinary. And of course, Hitler was well aware of all of this. So it's, you know, but yet what choice did he have under the circumstances? Couldn't simply allow it to happen. You know, he was put in such a difficult position almost from day one.

and now he's in the worst possible position, you know, regardless of the pact, which he knew wasn't real. I mean, he knew that pact wasn't going to last. It wasn't real. It wasn't going to last long. Salon did it just so the Western forces would fight, Western countries would fight,

and plus he had total knowledge of German military capabilities. Regardless of that, you know, I mean, this is why Stalin refused to believe for a long time that they've invaded the country. And there's a good reason for that. It had nothing to do with he didn't go into shock or all the other stupid propaganda. And he just said, are you kidding me? How? With what?

How many horses do they have? You know, so, but this breakdown is extraordinary. It's absolutely extraordinary. All right. We'll be back for episode 103 in a few days. Go to the show notes. and please go to the description on the videos, donate to Dr. Johnson's work,

links to his Patreon there, links to, I think he even got his cash app there, but his new book is linked there. You can support him by buying that too. And yeah, I finally got my, I finally got my,

I finally got my author's copy of my new book. And I'm telling you, I'm, this is the best thing I've ever done. everything from content to how it's laid out, how it's arranged. It was worth all the suffering that I went through to make it happen. It took a long time to get these.

But so it's, you know, obviously it's not just about the war. We have to talk about general European politics. and how this even came about in the first place, but the U.S. was doing what they were thinking. So it's far broader than that. I think it's probably the longest book I ever wrote, too, I think. And I'm extremely proud of it. This is one thing, and Patreon too,

I just put up a lengthy article on Maduro, all kinds of new information on there. And, you know, there's so much. I have what on Patreon right now, if you sign up, I have maybe 10 books worth of information there. In fact, I have a book that I published on there. One section on the Korean War, one section in the Vietnam War, which I said, you know what, I'm just going to give it to my patron people.

So the content there, and there's also weird things. I have something about, you know, artworks that Rob Halfer for Judas Priest isn't gay, which is true. things like that. I'm all over the place. But the one thing that certainly is, is original. And I really ask you to please sign up for that. I appreciate it if you do, at least consider it. All right, Dr. Johnson.

Talk to you in a couple days. Thank you. All right, my friend. Bye-bye. I want to welcome everyone back to our reading of 200 years together by Alexander Solzhenycin. This is episode number 103. Dr. Johnson, how are you doing? You know, when you have several special needs animals, nine total feeding time is a lot of work.

It's a huge amount of work. But now I think I've recovered. Everyone's happy and I'm ready to go. Well, I mean, your special needs yourself. So, I mean, that's a... As my mother would say, yes. She used to say I had... She said I had Tourette's syndrome, undiagnosed Tourette's syndrome, yeah.

No, that just means you grew up in the, in the New York City, tri-state area, which means that you use curses like a comma. Yeah, you know, we threw pennies at cars that we didn't like on the, on the parkway, the chip the paint. That's anti-Semitic. You know, that was normal, you know, I'm surprised my driving instructor didn't teach me that. That was normal to me. I learned how to drive in Manhattan in a limousine, no less.

As a 16-year-old, my father believed in throwing people into the, you don't know how to swim and get thrown into the ocean. That was fun. So, yeah, there is something wrong with me, no doubt. All right, picking up where we left off last time. So then, were the people's impressions of the war really prompted by anti-Semitic prejudice? Of course, by the beginning of the war, a certain part of the war, a certain part of the war, the older and middle-aged population still bore scars from the 1920s and 1930s. But a huge part of the soldiers were young men who were born at the turn of the revolutioner after it. Their perception

of the world differed from that of their elders dramatically. Compare. During the First World War, in spite of the spy mania of the military authorities in 1915 against the Jews who resided near the front lines, there was no evidence of anti-Semitism in the Russian army. In 1914, out of 5 million Russian Jews, by the beginning of World War I, about 400,000 Jews were inducted into the Russian Imperial Army, and by the end of the war in 1917, this number reached 500,000. This means that at the outbreak of the war, every 12th Russian Jew fought in the war, while by the end, one out of 10, and in World War II, every 8th or 7th. Well, that, you know, that goes for everybody.

Given the sheer size I'm talking about after World War I, World War II, the Soviet Army was so humongous. I think at this point, we're talking about 10 million. It was 6 million during that suicide mission invasion, and it grew much larger than that as time went on, as we saw actually last week with some of the numbers. And it just kept growing. But I think what he means by the scars of the 1920s and 30s, by scars, I think he's talking about, you know, it's not anti-Semitic prejudice at all. They saw people die from, you know, Jewish commissars all over the place, especially in the 1920s, upper management and middle management. And I think that's what he's referring to there. but it is true that soldiers once you're born

around the time the revolution are after all you know is Soviet propaganda so it's going to be a very different story so I think but these numbers these numbers aren't particularly impressive but and they're not impressive especially given the signs of the Soviet Army in World War II

So what was the matter? It can be assumed that the new disparities inside the army played their role with their influences growing stronger and sharper as one moved closer to the deadly front line. In 1874, Jews were granted equal rights with other Russian subjects regarding universal conscription. Yet during World War I until the February Revolution, Xander II's law, which stipulated that Jews could not advance above the rank of petty officer, though it did. not apply to military medics, was still enforced. Under the Bolsheviks, the situation had changed radically and during the World War II, as the Israeli encyclopedia summarizes, quote, compared to other nationalities of the Soviet Union, Jews were disproportionately represented among the senior officers, mainly because of the higher percentage of college graduates among

them, end quote. According to Arid's at valuation, quote, the number of Jew commissars and political officers in various units during the war was relatively higher than the number of Jews on other army positions. At the very least, a percentage of Jews in the political leadership of the army was three times higher than the overall percentage of Jews among the population of the USSR during that period. End quote. In addition, of course, Jews were, quote, among the head professionals and military medicine,

among the heads of health departments on several fronts, 26 Jewish generals of the Medical Corps, and nine generals of the veterinary corps were listed in the Red Army, end quote. 33 Jewish generals served in the Engineer Corps. Of course, Jewish doctors and military engineers occupied not only high offices among the military medical staff,

there were many Jews, doctors, nurses, orderlies. Let us recall that in 1926, the proportion of Jews among military doctors was 18.6% while their proportion in the male population was 1.7%. And this percentage

could only increase during the war because of the large number of female Jewish military doctors. Quote, traditionally, a high percentage of Jews in Soviet medicine

and engineering professions naturally contributed to their large number in the military units. I like what he does here. The paragraph prior to this, He talks about the large number of Jews serving in the army.

We're talking about World War II in this case. And then he goes on to say, well, they weren't exactly on the front line. In fact, very few of them were. You know, the Soviets had generals for everything. And these Jews, well, the political commissars, of course. and they were eliminated by the Germans very quickly whenever there was a way to do it. But they were in everything but frontline, you know, grunt fighting. I'm sure there were a few.

So he starts off saying, well, these are impressive numbers. And then he goes out to say, well, not really. Because they were doing other important things, but other things. They were not on the front line. they were not getting their their limbs blown off. They were still in the professions, although in this time completely mobilized under Stalin. So I love that.

It sounds like he's being phylo-Semitic here, and then he totally negates it. It's funny. However undeniably important and necessary for final victory these services were, what mattered is that not everybody could survive to see it. Meanwhile, an ordinary soldier, glancing back from the front line, saw all too clearly that even the second and third echelons behind the front were also considered participants in the war. All those deep rear headquarters, suppliers, the whole medical corps from a medical battalion to higher levels, numerous behind the lines, technical units, and of course, all kinds of service personnel there.

And in addition, the entire army propaganda machine, including touring ensembles, entertaining entertainment troops, They were all considered war veterans, and indeed it was apparent to everyone that the concentration of Jews was much higher there than at the front lines. I fought in the war. Some write that amongst Leningrad's veteran writers, the Jews comprised by most cautious and perhaps understated assessment, 31%. That is, probably more. Yet how many of them were editorial staff? As a rule, editorial offices were situated 10 to 15 kilometers behind. the front line, and even if a correspondent happened to be at the front during hostilities,

nobody would have forced him to hold the position. He could leave immediately, which is a completely different psychology. Many trumpeted their status as frontliners, but writers and journalists are guilty of it the most. Stories of prominent ones deserve a separate, dedicated analysis. Yet how many others, not prominent and not famous, frontliners settled in various newspaper publishing offices at all levels, at fronts, armies, corps, and divisions. Here is one episode. After graduating from the Machine Gun School, second lieutenant Alexander Gershkovitz was sent to the front. But after a spell at the hospital, while catching up with his unit at a minor railroad station, he sensed a familiar smell of printing ink, followed it and arrived at the

office of the division level newspaper, which serendipitously... I think he's being funny there. Was in need of a frontline correspondent, and his fate had changed. But what about catching up with his infantry unit? Quote, in this new position, he traveled thousands of kilometers of the war roads. Of course, military journalists perished in the war as well. So not only were they really not in the fighting corps, but they were later on claiming to be. Now, you know, medical corps, medics were, that's legitimate frontline stuff. you're not supposed to shoot them, you know, if they're well marked.

But given the nature of that war, I don't know. Correspondence was a totally different story. It wasn't like it was in full metal jacket. You know, they had a very different, you know, they could leave. Now, I also like the notion, glancing back from the front line, the second and third echelons behind the front, participants in the war. You know, I reread, there's several sections in Yoakim Hoffman's Stalin's War of Extermination on those rear echelon. He goes so far as to say that the majority of the Soviet casualties or maybe 50% came from them.

You had so many of these young draftees fighting for Stalin, which was iffy by itself, not allowed to, to retreat because as I said last time there's no such thing as defense in Soviet military doctrine. It's just nothing but offense. It's like the early 80s San Diego Chargers with Dan Fouts, no defense, everything into the offense. That's how it was. And the constant move forward, I mean, it wasted so many men. But clearly, you know, terror gripped these, especially with these young kids, Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians. And if they're not, they're going to they did anything but do that, they got, they were, they were shot, they were murdered, essentially. And those men who did a killing of their own men, they, they were going around calling themselves

combat veterans, you know, I want a pension, got medals, even though they were, they were, they were, they were murderers. They were there to enforce Stalin's orders as it came down the chain of command to the Jewish commissars. And second and third echelons, in the words, there was more than one. So, and they were heavily armed, and they were not necessarily,

they were in danger of artillery attack, but not necessarily direct combat. Only the medics were. And that's legitimate, of course. They do get shot at. I hate the idea. People call themselves veterans because they were in the army

for a couple of years when there was a war going on. They never left Missouri. but but you know they call themselves veterans I vehemently dislike that I grew up with the idea that a veteran by definition is a combat veteran you weren't a veteran you were just in the army and there's something like that going on here where um you know even even these very distasteful positions the the rear echelons were going on later on you know claiming a pension and claiming to be combat vets and everything else.

But yeah, they were in combat or right against their own people. And then, of course, the funny use of the, oh, I small printer ink, you know, and it just didn't matter. And, of course, they'd go right into journalism, which is, you know, a huge, strong suit of theirs. And I guess to some extent, you know, it wasn't entirely their country. It wasn't like Israel is now. but it was very close to being their country, which is why they wanted special regions, you know, like Crimea or Birrubisdan or something like that.

It wasn't Jewish enough. And so, again, fighting for Stalin was okay, far better than fighting for Zarniklos for anyone else. So I think that's what he's talking about here. And it looks like the Jews had a lot more freedom to go where they pleased than you're typically. The war was fought by Russians and Ukrainians. They were the ones doing the dying.

They were the ones doing the shooting, period. And that's what he seems to be saying here. Musician Michael Goldstein, who got the white ticket not fit, because of poor vision, writes of himself, quote, I always strive to be at the front where I gave thousands of concerts, where I wrote a number of military songs and where I often dug trenches. often, really, a visiting musician and with a shovel in his hands? As a war veteran, I say, an absolutely incredible picture. Or here is another amazing biography.

Eugenie Gershuni, in the summer of 1941, volunteered for a militia unit, where he soon organized a small pop ensemble. Those who know about these unarmed and even non-uniform columns marching to certain death would be chilled. Ensemble indeed. In September 1941, Gershouni, with his group of artists from the militia, was posted to Leningrad's Red Army Palace, where he organized and headed a troop entertainment circus. The story ends on May 1945 when Gershune's circus threw a show on the steps of the Reichstag in Berlin. Oh, my God. I mean, this is just macab at this point. Yeah, sovelness saying, yeah, I don't think so.

Now, I'm not, I'm not taking away from the necessity of morale builders like this. They did it in Vietnam all the time. My father was a Marine in Korea, First Marine Division. He never mentioned, he didn't talk about it much, but he talked about it only to me. He never mentioned any, like, you know, Marilyn Monroe coming over. But that has its place. It's important. but you can't go around claiming to be a veteran, and certainly a combat veteran after that.

Now, the significance of Leningrad is, of course, it was under siege for most of the war, from the invasion almost to the end. And I've done a lengthy paper on that where, you know, Soviet propaganda made it out to be that they were starving to death, even though the Germans made sure to allow a path for people, for civilians to leave, children to leave. And once, you know, this started a lot of trouble later on, there were tons of food. Lots of food that was only for the handful of party elite. That was not discovered and was not mentioned until Khrushchev's era. Now, I was raised to believe that they were being starved to death by the German invasion.

by this German juggernaut. They couldn't take it. They couldn't take the city. But it's actually a fascinating story because they weren't entirely surrounded and it was on purpose. And the Germans realized that they weren't going to kill children. No one killed children on purpose anyway. And so there was a lifeline and people can leave.

but the supplies that were available when the war people found all of this sitting there when they were claiming to be starving to death was extraordinary and it's interesting because so many of the big scientific institutes of

the Atlantic St. Petersburg of course so it's the Northern Army Army Army he'll be Army Group A, I think, at the time. He had many scientific institutes there. So they were coming up with all kinds of different ways to feed the population. And it was actually very interesting to read about it.

You know, it wasn't nearly as nasty as it later propaganda showed it. But it would have been much better had that small, group of party elites would have, you know, let their stores open. They had all kinds of booze and all kinds of Western made chocolates and anything they wanted, which was not known until after just a bit after Stalin's death. So that's what he's talking. That's why he's talking about Leningrad. And I'm not so sure if he was in Leningrad, he would have been trapped there. you would think. So his story doesn't seem to be adding up here,

and I think that's his, that's Solzhenitin's point. Of course, the Jews fought in the infantry and on the front line. In the middle of the 1970s, the Soviet source provides data on the ethnic composition of 200 infantry divisions between January 1, 1943 and January 1st, 1944, and compares it to the population share of each nationality within the pre-September 1939 borders of the USSR. During that period, Jews comprised respectively 1.5% and 1.2.8% in those divisions,

while their proportion to the population in 1939 was 1.78%. Only by the middle of 1944, when mobilization began in the liberated areas, did the percentage of Jews fall to 1.14% because almost all Jews in those areas were exterminated. It should be noted here that some audacious Jews took an even more fruitful and energetic part in the war outside of the front. For example, the famous red orchestra of Trepper Engrovich spied on Hitler's regime from within until the fall of 1942, passing to the Soviets extremely important strategic and tactical information. Both spies were arrested and held by the Gestapo until the end of the war. Then, after liberation, they were arrested and imprisoned in the USSR. Trevor for 10 years and Gurevich for 15 years.

Here is another example. A Soviet spy Lev Manovich was ex-commander of a special detachment during the Civil War and later a long-term spy in Germany, Austria, and Italy. In 1936, he was arrested in Italy, but he managed to communicate with Soviet intelligence, even from the prison. In 1943, while imprisoned the Nazi camps under the name of Colonel Sarastin, he participated in the anti-fascist underground. In 1945, he was liberated by the Americans but died before returning to the USSR, where he could have easily faced imprisonment.

Only 20 years later, in 1965, where he was awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union posthumously, one can also find very strange biographies such as Mikhail Scheinman's. Since in 1920s, he served as a provincial secretary of the Komsomal during the most rampant years of the Union of Militant Atheon he was employed at its headquarters. Then he graduated from the Institute of Red Professors and worked in the press department of the Central Committee of the VKPD. In 1941, he was captured by the Germans

and survived the entire war in captivity, a Jew and a high-level commissar at that. And despite categorical evidence of his culpability from Smirsch's Frontline Counterintelligence Organization literally Death to Spies, point of view, how could he possibly survive if he was not a traitor. Others were imprisoned for a long time for lesser crimes. Yet

nothing happened that in 1946, he was already safely employed in the Museum of the History of Religion and then in the Institute of History at the Academy of Science. I know this is only anecdotal. I know that. But you can't help it smile. I mean, you know, despite all the death and the slaughter and the misery. It's absolutely, it is so absurd here. You know, I'm not sure how you can pass information in a German camp. You know, the Gestapo, as many of us know, were a fairly small organization. I think the largest it ever became was 5,000, 6,000 men unarmed.

More likely it was military, political. least that took care of it. And he created an anti-fascist underground within the camps, suggesting that the camps were, you know, decentralized at best. And I know in many camps, it was, the camps certainly existed. They were run by very powerful, you know, Jewish mafia. There's no doubt about that anymore. And that's been demonstrated in a million different ways.

now I know we've had this before but any contact with the Germans especially if you were from the Western regions imprisoned by them that means that you were subject to their propaganda which means you can't be trusted which means you're going to go to prison and here are propaganda for 10 years

which is what happened to Shultzhenason at first you know so and so he's he's talking about you talk about things that are that are highly implausible that these guys are saying despite the fact that

you know they're clearly they're clearly exaggerating things but since you know he talked about the number of Jews or the impressive numbers in the military Soviet military for the rest of this since then he has completely debunked that not not the numbers but what exactly they were doing the whole time yet such anecdotal evidence cannot make up a convincing argument for either side and there is no reliable and specific statistics nor are they likely to surface in the future recently an israeli periodical had published some interesting testimony when a certain jonas dagan decided to volunteer for a comsumal prison at the beginning of the war another jewish youth shulum dain whom jonas invited to come and join him replied that it would not be it would not be it would not

be really fortunate if the Jews could just watch the battle from afar since this is not their war, though namely this war may inspire Jews and help them to rebuild Israel. When I am conscripted to the army, I'll go to war, but to volunteer, not a chance. Wow. And Dane was not the only one with thoughts like this. In particular, older and more experienced Jews may have had similar thoughts. And this attitude, especially among the Jews, devoted to the eternal idea of Israel, fully understandable, and yet it is baffling because the advancing army was the arch enemy of the

Jews seeking above all else to annihilate them. How could Dane and like-minded individuals remain neutral? Did they think the Russians had no other choice but to fight for their land anyway? Yeah, they're thinking, you know, there's Zionists. A minority still, that changed after the war, especially in northern Europe, central Europe. But, you know, saying it's not their war, I could picture that. Again, we've already mentioned. He's, it's, it's far better than fighting for Tsar Nicholas, but, or, or, you know, old, orthodox Russia in general. But it's certainly better.

And so the only, the only place I want to go, the only place I would actually farm the land, the only place I would fight for is rebuilding Israel and Palestine. And I don't think that was a majority opinion at the time. And it also goes to show the news that they were getting about German intentions was all over the place, too. Zionists and Hitler had an alliance at first. And for a very good reason. They're both nationalists. They both wanted a solution to a problem.

and it would have been peaceful and everything else. So, you know, I can completely understand this. This makes perfect sense. I believe it. And so however many, whatever percentage of Jews resign us at the time, probably we're thinking very much like this. One modern commentator, I know him personally, he is a veteran and a former camp inmate, concludes, quote, even among the older veterans these days,

I have not come across people with such clarity of thought and depth of understanding as Shulam Dane, who perished at Stalingrad, possessed. Quote, two fascist monsters interlocked in deadly embrace. Why should we participate in that? Of course, Stalin's regime was not any better than Hitler's, but for the wartime Jews, these two monsters could not be equal. If that other monster won, what could then have happened to the Soviet Jews? Wasn't this war the personal Jewish war?

Wasn't it their own patriotic war to cross arms with the deadliest enemy and the entire Jewish history. And those Jews who perceived the war as their own and who did not separate their fate from that of the Russians, those like Freelich, Lazaroff, and Vaynerman, whose thinking was opposite to Shulam Dains, they fought selflessly.

And you see how the mirror image of that with the Slavic armies that were created, you know, really just on their own, many of them, and how the SS treated them, these Slavic forces that wanted to fight Stalin, you would think, okay, now here's the time. And if it was just the infantry, if it was just the German army, it would have been wonderful. I think the only stipulation was that these forces had to be German-led,

had to have German officers, which is interesting. They had to have a translator, I would think. But at least that was on paper, the concept. But the misuse of these, and there were many of them, Slavic army in Russia and in Ukraine, you know, opening the churches, that by itself, you know, made so many people happy. Destroying the Germans destroyed the collective farms and let them go back to their own land. I mean, this was huge. Of course they had every motivation to fight for them anyway. despite all that. And yet the SS goes in,

people like Eric Koch, you know, I, I got to send you my paper on him, or at least I know I did a lecture on him, who was ahead of Ukraine for, for the SS, absolutely turned the entire country against Germany, which was awful.

So that seems, that seems to be too parallelist, if you ask me. God forbid, I do not explain the Dane's position as Jewish cowardice. Yes, the Jews demonstrated survivalist prudence and caution throughout the entire history of the diaspora, yet it is this history that explains these qualities. And during the Six-Day War and other Israeli wars, the Jews have proven their outstanding military courage. Yeah, that's what I just said. If they're going to fight for anybody, it's going to be for a clearly Jewish state. The only exceptions of course being the

ultra-Orthodox who were anti-Zionists from the start, the Orthodox in Jerusalem who would be discussed a long time ago, who wanted nothing to do with Israel, who were there before Israel, that's where they're going to do,

that's where they're going to form, that's where they're going to fight. Because it was Jewish. Any other place, even the USSR, any other place, they're going to at least be iffy about it. but when it comes to a fully Jewish state, the Jewish purpose, both ethnically and religiously, yes, they'll die for that. It's a huge, huge thing that many people don't understand.

Taking all that into consideration, Dane's position can only be explained by a relaxed feeling of dual citizenship. The very same that back in 1922, Professor Solomon Lurie from Petrograd, considered as one of the main sources of anti-suitary. and its explanation. A Jew living in a particular country belongs not only to that country, and its loyalties become inevitably split in two. The Jews have always harbored nationalist attitudes, but the object of their nationalism was Jewry, not the country in which they lived. Their interest in this country is partial. After all, they, even if many of them only unconsciously, saw a head looming in the future of their very own nation of Israel. Well, that's an obvious statement that we all know to be true, whether they're Zionists or not.

But if they were going to fight for somebody, that was not a Jewish state. Or a state, it was not a Jewish state. It would be something like the USSR or the U.S. in their war against similar. That would be the next best thing for them. But even there, as we've been reading, they're – not exactly at their front lines. And what about the rear? Researchers are certain about the growth of anti-Semitism during the war.

The curve of anti-Semitism in those years rose sharply again in anti-Semitic manifestations by their intensity and prevalence dwarfed the anti-Semitism of the second half of the 1920s. During the war, anti-Semitism became commonplace in the domestic life in the Soviet Deep Hinterland. During evacuation, so-called domestic anti-Semitism, which had been, and dormant since the establishment of the Stalinist dictatorship in the early 1930s, was revived against the background of general insecurity and breakdown in other hardships and deprivations engendered by the war. This statement refers mainly to Central Asia, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan, and Kazakhstan,

especially when the masses of wounded and disabled veterans rushed there from the front, and exactly there the masses of the evacuated Jews lived, including Polish Jews, who were torn from their traditional environment by deportation. and who had no experience of Soviet Kolkoses. Still can't pronounce it. Here are the testimonies of Jewish evacuees to Central Asia recorded soon after the war. The low labor productivity among evacuated Jews

served in the eyes of the locals as a proof of allegedly characteristic Jewish reluctance to engage in physical labor. The intensification of anti-Semitic attitudes was fueled by the Polish refugees' activity on the commodity markets. Yeah, commodity markets. During the war, in the refugee camps, they were still in the commodity markets.

That blows me away. Soon they realized that their regular incomes from the employment and industrial enterprises, Kolkis and cooperatives would not save them from starvation and death. To survive, there was only one way, trading on the market or speculation. Therefore, it was a Soviet reality that drove Polish Jews to resort to market transactions whether they liked it or not. The non-Jewish population of Tashkent was ill-disposed toward the Jewish evacuees from Ukraine.

Some said, look at these Jews. They always have a lot of money. Then there were incidents of harassment and insults of Jews, threats against them, throwing them out of bread queues. Another group of Russian Jews, mostly bureaucrats with a considerable amount of cash, inspired the hostility of the locals for inflating the already high market prices.

Well, I mean, we know that this is the case. Wherever they go, whatever the situation is, it tends to be that way. And why does Polish choose? And remember, Solzhenitin wasn't, when he got cancer, he was, well, still, you know, in prison was sent to Central Asia. So he knows a lot of this firsthand. and we talked about the preferences given to Jews when they were evacuated at the beginning of the invasion and although I refuse to believe that they would have simply starved

that's what they say, that's the propaganda is, oh, if you didn't do this, we'd starve to death. Well, there were plenty of other people who didn't do that who didn't starve to death who were also removed. You know, Stalin-loved population transfers, whether it's legitimate or not, clearly you want to remove people from the front who can't fight. But he moved so many populations around. The Koreans are just one example. The Tartars are another example.

And they didn't do this kind of thing. And then they get dumped on a population. And with all the others who were sent, let's say, any part of Central Asia, which, as we know, and I've written on extensively, were almost annihilated by the Jewish Communist Party, particularly in Kazakhstan, where the native Kazakh population went down so far that there were then a minority in their own country by the end of the war. And to say that there weren't two dictators who did it there,

it would be a lie. They were. And we've talked about that already. So clearly there's reason for for, for ill will. And then this. But I'm not sure why it's just the Polish, why it's just a Polish Jews. And why they would worry about, you know, being ripped from their enterprises or cooperative.

You know, everyone was. Everyone who wasn't able to fight, I guess. You know. So to survive, there's only one way. Speculation. No speculation. Well, they were speculating on food. They're speculating on the things that were feeding everyone else around them.

So, of course, you're going to be despised. There's no way around it. The author proceeds confidently to explain these facts of us, quote, Hitler's propaganda reaches even here, end quote. And he is not alone in reaching such conclusions. What a staggering revelation. How could Hitler's propaganda were victoriously reach and permeate all of Central Asia when it was barely noticeable at the front with all those rare and dangerous to touch leaflets thrown from airplanes

and when all private radio receiver sets were confiscated throughout the USSR? No. The author realizes that their, quote, was yet another reason for the growth of anti-Semitic attitude in the districts that absorbed evacuees and mass. There, the antagonism between the general mass of the provincial population and the privileged bureaucrats from the country's central cities manifested itself in a subtle form. Evacuation of organizations from these centers into the hinterland provided the local population with an opportunity to fully appreciate the depth of social contrast. But, you know, did I send you that article on Kazakhstan?

done. From the Cuff of the Barron's Review? You did not. Okay, I will. It's done. It's ready to go. I love for our listeners to read it. He's not just talking about Central Asia, but elsewhere as well.

And what they did to the local population is absolutely, well, it's brutal to say the very least. And there was always a contempt of cops. against Jews no matter what. And it wasn't just Jews, though. You had people with, you know, bureaucrats who were used to a normal, you know, posh life in cities being dumped off there. You know, they couldn't fight or they were, you know,

4F or whatever. And so, yeah, it means that it is their behavior. They were driving the price of food up or whatever it was that, you know, they were essentially refugees. at this point. And, but the only, the only, the only army that had endless supply problems was a German one, not the, not the Soviet one and certainly not the Soviet population. And especially when you consider, and don't forget, the American lifeline came in through Persia, came in through Iran, which is not that far away.

and I don't know if there's a connection there or not that would be an interesting question to look into so much stuff came up through there a huge amount and all that debt was immediately canceled by the U.S. after the war they just got it a billion dollar even then there's a huge number amount of

despite the fact that the Soviets had by far the largest number of tanks in the world and infantrymen you know they were oversupplied if anything and Germans of course were struggling with ammunition struggling with

but you could read your de Grell's book you know they didn't have any control over the air and yeah it was a meat grinder for both sides but

but you know for the Germans they were they were kind of stuck I remember when I was a kid I talked about those Time and Life books and there was another separate book just on Stalingrad and at the end there was a picture

of a young German guy and the caption walking I said it was in Germany here's this young veteran of Stalingrad walking trying to find his house which probably at this point doesn't exist but those were the people who were doing the fighting and the dying at the time.

And I love his sarcasm with the Hitler's propaganda reaches even here, which is inconceivable. You know, Stalin was very strict about that anyway. The commissars would have noticed any of it. Germans were not doing the leaflet thing. It was a miracle if they were able to fly in and dump supplies and then get out. that by itself, especially, you know, during Stalingrad, Stalingrader, that would have been a miracle. And, of course, it was never enough. So we just didn't have this problem.

And so it's, I think, I think Stalingrad was the, the epitome of human suffering from a military point of view. and I guarantee you that there were plenty of Red Army soldiers who noticed that there were all Russians there or Ukrainians there or Kazakhs there. And I think that that was a consistent problem throughout the history of the USSR. We talked about this going back to the many episodes ago with the 1920s. That, you know, they seem to be far more privileged than we are, even though they remember. of the party, seem to be far wealthier than we are despite the fact

we're supposed to be fighting this kind of thing and it just never ended. But again, the best is the opportunity to fully appreciate the depths of social contrast. That's the best way to put it, you know, tongue in cheek.

I knew exactly what he was talking about when he wrote that and there's no way around it. It's perfect. I think maybe we should stop there. I think I'll start talking about the German invasion. Yeah, yeah, in Ukraine. Yeah, that works for me. Yeah.

All righty. Be back in a couple days. Please go to the show notes and donate to Dr. Johnson's work. You have all the links there to where you can donate and also link to his new book, which is another way of supporting him. So please go ahead and please go ahead and do that. you got anything to close us out with or just want to get out of here well no i i told you i got the i showed you the book last time i got my review copies and uh um this is the best thing i've

ever written i i slaved over it i suffered over it more than any other book and it's noticeable i will say right now this is the best book on the topic and probably will remain the best book on the topic for for in in the near future um and uh uh i hit it from all angles i please this is this is a first rate book buy it leave a review whatever um i'm very proud of it awesome we'll be back in a couple days with episode number 104 thank you dr johnson thank you see you later i want to welcome everyone back to our reading of 200 years together by alexander solshinison this is episode number 104, Dr. Johnson. How are you doing today?

104. I don't know. Hey, listen, I got to tell you guys, having a diabetic dog is a lot more work than you would think. It's just, you know, he becomes obsessed with food. He's on a strict diet. It's just the weirdest thing. I was never really a dog guy, but these are my one. But I love them, you know.

and when he became a diabetic, probably through his own fault because he ate an entire box of uncooked spaghetti. And all of a sudden, a few months later, he's drinking, you know, he diagnosed a diabetes. He's got to be a connection. He is a food maniac. And it's just, you know, taking things out of his mouth. He's like a toddler. It's brutal. And we couldn't do it if we weren't here, you know.

Thank God I could do this mostly from my home or else he'd be in a lot of trouble. Yeah. When animals, when you end up having to take care of them for illnesses, it's always, people don't realize when you get one that needs something like every day, three or four times a day, it's how much of a, I mean, well, anyway, anyone who has, anyone who's raised a kid is, is laughing at me right now, so I understand. Yeah.

Well, you know, I mean, I've raised three, well, two and a half. You know, they're kind of a, they're at toddler level, but catch, of course, are far more, far more independent. So, and Marcel, by the way, eating on his own, I'm not feeding him anymore through hand-fed. He's doing great. He's never been better. I don't know if it's just a phase or what, but I have to arrange it in a certain way, the wet food.

But no, he's there on his own. It's, he's, he is actually improving. I don't understand it. I can't see in there. He'll never let me look in there. But, yeah, he is, he's doing very well. That's awesome. That's awesome.

It is. All right. Picking up where we left off last time. Then there were those populations. that experienced the German invasion and occupation, for instance, the Ukrainians. Here is testimony published in March 1945 in the Bulletin of Jewish Agency for Palestine. Quote, the Ukrainians meet returning Jews with hostility. In Kharkov, a few weeks after the liberation, Jews do not dare walk alone on the streets at night.

There have been many cases of beating up Jews on the local markets. Upon returning to their homes, Jews often found only a portion of their property. but when they complained in courts, Ukrainians often perjured themselves against them. The same thing happened everywhere, besides it was useless to complain in court anyway. Many of the returning non-Jewish evacuees found their old places looted as well. There are many testimonies about hostile attitude towards Jews and Ukraine after its liberation from the Germans. As a result of the German occupation, anti-Semitism in all its forms, has significantly increased in all social strata of Ukraine and Moldova and Lithuania.

Well, despite their best efforts, the Germans still built a community there amongst Ukrainians and Romanians. You talked about the SS, ruining it, almost ruining it, or at least Eric Koch in Ukraine, who is worth a discussion. I haven't talked about him in a long time. but even with that it's much better than Stalin and it's much better with the Jewish

not so much the Jewish elite but the Jewish bureaucrats at the local level you know the Jewish agency for Palestine will have no clue as to why anti-Semitism would rise here has nothing to do with their behavior of course and it's just

we could go back to the first few episodes of the show of our project here in the Polish Empire that's simply the that's how they that's how they it's what they do

um usury debt everything else um that's what they did in Eastern Europe and even mainstream writers believe it or not in major

publications fully admit that you know and that's that's that they were doing that 20 years ago they were admitting that 20 years ago it's really hard to defend but the Jewish agency for Palestine

I don't think we'll fully understand why this is the case why would liberated areas with Jews returning be treated with hostility there were a lot of people returning that weren't treated with hostility indeed

here in these territories Hitler's anti-Jewish propaganda did work well during the years of occupation, and yet the main point was the same, that under the Soviet regime, the Jews had merged with the ruling class, and so a secret German report from the occupied territories in October 1941 states that, quote, the animosity of the Ukrainian population against Jews is enormous. They view the Jews as informants and agents of the NKVD, which organized the terror against the Ukrainian people. And, course. Yeah, that's extremely important.

They didn't need propaganda. They didn't need anything. They just need to experience it. They did run the NKBD in these areas. Ukraine, especially, heavily Judaic, especially in central, southern parts, very, very Jewish. They ran all of this. Of course, they don't want them back. and it's unfortunate that Germany wasn't able to harness that very well.

Generally speaking, early in the war, the Germans' plan was to create an impression that it was not Germans but the local population that began extermination of the Jews. As Schwartz believes that, unlike the reports of the German propaganda press, the German reports not intended for publication are reliable. He profusely quotes a report by SS Stundonfurr F. Schloch, Schloch, to Berlin on the activities of the SS units under his command, operating in the Baltic states by LaRcia and in some parts of the RSFSR for the period between the beginning of the war in the east and October 15, 1941. quote, despite facing considerable difficulties, we were able to direct local anti-Semitic forces toward organization of anti-Jewish pogroms within several hours after arrival of German troops. It was necessary to show that it was a natural reaction to the years of oppression by Jews and communist terror. It was equally important to establish for future as an undisputed and provable fact

that the local people have resorted to the most severe measures against Bolsheviks and Jews on their own initiative without demonstrable evidence for any guidance from the German authorities. Well, you remember, the asses didn't come in until later. You know, they came in after the infantry moved in. I'm not talking about Waphaena, I'm talking about just your political side. So, but there were plenty of outpourings for the Germans. That's an established fact. Act, and it's both against the Stalinist regime, and it's also against the Jews who ran it.

Regardless, I mean, that's the only thing that makes sense. And, you know, they wanted to make it look that way, but they really didn't have to work very hard. The willingness of the local population for such initiatives varied greatly in different occupied regions. In the tense atmosphere of the Baltics, the hatred of Jews. Jews reached a boiling point at the very moment of Hitler's onslaught against Soviet Russia on June 22, 1941, end quote. The Jews were accused of collaboration with the NKVD in the deportation of Baltic citizens. The Israeli Encyclopedia quotes an entry from the diary of Lithuanian physician E. B. Kuturgin. Quote, all Lithuanians, with few exceptions, are unanimous in their

hatred of Jews. Yet the Standard Furer reports that two To our surprise, it was not an easy task to induce a pogrom there. This was achieved with the help of Lithuanian partisans who exterminated 1,500 Jews in Connus during the night of June 26th and 2300 more in the next few days. They also burned the Jewish quarter in several synagogues. Mass execution of the Jews were conducted by the SS and Lithuanian police on October 29th and November 25th, 1941. About 19,000 of 36,000 Jews of Khanos were shot in the ninth fort. Quote, in many Lithuanian cities and towns, all the Jewish population was exterminated by local Lithuanian police under German control in the autumn of 1941.

Quote, it was much harder to induce the same self-cleaning operations and programs in Latvia reports of Stendert and Furor. Because there, quote, the entire national leadership, especially in Rigo, was destroyed or destroyed. deported by the Bolsheviks, end quote. Still on July 4th, 1941, Latvian activists in Riga, quote, set fire to several synagogues in which the Jews were, had been herded, about 2,000 died, end quote. In the first days of occupation, locals assisted in executions by the Germans of several thousand Jews in the Bikerniki Forest near Riga, and in late October and in early November in the shootings of about 27,000 Jews at a nearby railway station in Rumbala.

In Estonia, with a small number of Jews in the country, it was not possible to induce pogroms, reports the officer. Estonian Jews were destroyed without pogroms. Quote, in Estonia, about 2,000 Jews remained. Almost all male Jews were executed in the first weeks of the occupation by the Germans and their Estonian collaborators. The rest were interned in the concentration camp, Harcou, near Tallinn. and by the end of 1941, all of them were killed. All right. Well, I have no reason to doubt any of this.

The Baltics is sometimes not associated with, I mean, the Pellas settlement was very far from the Baltic states. They were independent states that were just taken a year earlier by Stalin and held by the NKVD. So those governments, those nationalist governments, were dismantled and destroyed by a largely Jewish police force. And to say something like, again, I assume this isn't for publication. Oh, no, what? Oh, it is for the Israeli encyclopedia. Oh, never mind. Unanimous in their hatred of Jews. That has to be explained. You can't just say they're jealous or something stupid like that. unanimous, which means when they took the Baltics and they canceled their independence,

which is in 1940, they had to have behaved terribly to cleanse it and make it a part of the USSR. So these are local attacks on Jews. The Baltics, of course, there was a grain trade through there, gold trade through there, but I don't think that was the issue. I think the issue was they were the heart of the invasion and then the elimination of the independence of the Baltic states. And that was well known in the public. And that has something to do with this. I mean, unanimous. You can't say that about anyone else.

So that's, you know, and admitting that is it's something extraordinary. So my opinion is that it has to do with the canceling of their independence just a year earlier. Yeah. I think that once people, once you understand that every side in this war considered it to be a Rossen-Krieg, You just read this and you're like, you can read this without emotion. Because everyone was doing this. Everyone was doing this to each other. It's just that one group, one group gets to, got to turn it into propaganda and use it politically going forward.

Yes, as Willis Carter used to say, they made it a part of their religion. but yes and this this was common in many places but i don't think the intensity the you know of course we know what happened with the serbs and the um eustasha um which will be one example i think of what you're talking about um and that was that was just as nasty as this but unanimous that's still you know that's that's a very powerful thing for the in the Israeli encyclopedia to say. So this seems to be a popular revolt against not just, you know, the dentist down the street, but the NKVD and their supporters and the Marxists in the area who welcomed the invasion of their country

and their incorporation into the Gulag state of the Soviet Union. But the German leadership was disappointed in Belarusia. S. Schwartz, quote, the failure of the Germans to draw sympathy from the broad masses of locals to the cause of extermination of Jews is completely clear from secret German documents. The population invariably and consistently refrains from any independent action against the Jews. End quote. Still, according to eyewitnesses in Garadok in the Vitebsk Oblast, when the ghetto was liquidated on October 14, 1941, the police say were worse than the Germans.

and in Borisov, the Russian police, it follows in the report that they were actually imported from Berlin, destroyed within two days, 6,500 Jews. Importantly, the author of the report notes that the killing of Jews were not met with sympathy, were not met with sympathy from the local population. Quote, who ordered that? How is it possible? Now they killed the Jews, and one will be our turn. What have these poor Jews done?

They were just workers. The really guilty ones are, of course, long guns. end quote. And here is a report by a German trustee, a native Belarusian from Latvia. Quote, in Belarusia, there is no Jewish question. For them, it is purely German business, not Belarusian. Everybody sympathizes with and pities the Jews,

and they look at Germans as barbarians and murderers of the Jews. A Jew, they say, is a human being just like a bilirossian, quote, end quote. In any case, Eschwartz writes that there were no national biorlo-urisian squads affiliated with the German punitive units, though there were Latvian, Lithuanian, and mixed squads. The latter enlisted some bilirassians as well. Yeah, it's interesting. I'm not sure because they had a large Jewish population.

But remember, at this point, much of that had been removed and sent to the interior or to Central Asia. it sounds like that when the Germans started it, the local police then got very excited and followed them easily. I'm not sure, you know, this seems to be purely anecdotal. How is it possible when it's going to be our turn around? But it was a legitimate question. You know, to ask that, you know, what are they done?

but this is it's odd because this is very an anecdotal statement here. The report sent there just really a few months after the, after the invasion. So, but again, I have no reason to doubt any of this. The project was more successful in Ukraine. From the beginning of the war, Hitler's propaganda incited the Ukrainian nationalists, Bandera's fighters, to take revenge on the Jews for the murder of Petlura by Schwarzwart. The organization of Ukrainian nationalists of Bandera-Melnik-O-U-N did not need to be persuaded. Even before the Soviet-German War in April 1941, it adopted a resolution at its second Congress in Krakow,

in which paragraph 17 states, quote, The Yids in the Soviet Union are the most loyal supporters of the ruling Bolshevik regime and the vanguard of Moscow imperialism in Ukraine. The organization of Ukrainian nationalists considers the Yidds as the pillar of the Moscow-Bulshevik regime while educating the masses that Moscow is the main enemy, end quote. Initially, the Bandera fighters allied with the Germans against the Bolsheviks. During the whole of 1941 and the first half of 1940 and the first half of 1941, the OUN leadership was preparing for a possible war between Germany and the U.S.

are. Quote, then the main base of the OUN was the general government, i.e. the Nazi-occupied Poland. Ukrainian militias were being created there, and lists of suspicious persons with Jews among them were compiled. Later, these lists were used by Ukrainian nationalists to exterminate Jews. Mobile units for the East Ukraine were created in battalions of Ukrainian nationalists. Roland and Naktagal were formed in the German army. The OUN arrived in the east of Ukraine, together with the frontline German troops. During the summer of 1941, a wave of Jewish programs rolled over Western Ukraine with participation of both Melnix and of Bandaris troops.

As a result of these programs, around 28,000 Jews were killed. Among OUN documents, there was a declaration by J. Stetsko, who in July 1941 was named the head of the Ukrainian government. Quote, the Jews helped Moscow to keep Ukraine in slavery. and therefore I support extermination of the Yids and the need to adopt in Ukraine the German methods of extermination of jewelry. In July, a meeting of Bandaris OUN leaders were held in LeVov, where, among other topics, policies towards Jews were discussed. There were various proposals to build the policy on the principles of the Nazi policy before 1939. There were proposals to isolate Jews in ghettos, but the most radical proposal was made by Stepan Lankovsky, who stated, concerning the Jews, we will adopt all the measures that will lead to their eradication.

And until the relations between the OU.N. and the Germans deteriorated, because Germany did not recognize his self-proclaimed Ukrainian independence, there were many cases, especially in the first year, when Ukrainians directly assisted the Germans in the extermination of Jews. Ukrainian auxiliary police recruited by the Germans, mainly in Galicia and Volina, played a special role. In Uman, in September 1941, Ukrainian city police under command of the several officers and sergeants of the SS shot nearly 6,000 Jews. And in early November 6th, K.M. outside Rovno, the SS and Ukrainian police slaughtered 21,000 Jews from the ghetto. However, Eschwartz writes, quote, it is impossible to figure out which part of the Ukrainian population shared an active anti-Semitism with a predisposition toward pogroms, possibly quite a large part, particularly the more cultured strata, did not share these sentiments, end quote.

As for the original part of the Soviet Ukraine, within the pre-September 1939 Soviet borders, no evidence for the spontaneous pogroms by Ukrainians could be found in the secret German reports from those areas. In addition, Tatar, militia, militia squads in the Crimea were exterminating Jews also. Yes, even the Tartars. You know, you don't do something like that unless you are extremely pissed off. You know, there were many minorities living in Ukraine.

You know, there were Armenians. There were Greeks. There were plenty of Serbs. There's a whole Serbian area there at the time. Armenians did very well. Greeks were excellent traders. So both of those groups did better than the local population. And historically speaking, anyway, not sure about the tartars.

So all of the ingredients, the claim that it was out of jealousy because we're doing better than you. Now, there's plenty of minorities there that were doing better than your typical Ukrainian. They lived in the cities. Now, Ukrainians lived in the countryside. So these numbers I question because, you know, the majority of Jews have been removed at this point. But the concept is still the same. And by the way, I know this is shameless, but I have a book out on the topic, simply called Ukrainian nationalism, which came out in 2018. team.

You can find it on Amazon, and it deals with some of this stuff. It deals with the OUN. It deals with the nationalist movement in Galicia Ville, and elsewhere. And I really would love for you to pick it up. But I have the feeling that these, they make it sound like they just put them up against wall and shot them. I have the feeling that these were either members of the old government or were partisans. The partisans were very Judaic, the irregular forces fighting the Germans.

And of course, the Germans had to respond in kind. And this is where something the O-U-N came in handy. But this relationship didn't last long, unfortunately. again you had so many other minorities in and you know the Armenians aren't Orthodox so you can't even talk about the religious connection like you could with the Greeks or the Serbs Solomon Schwartz as much as he's entertaining you know it's you could kind of roll your eyes at him but this was the location of the heart of the Palo Settlement this wasn't prejudice. These were people who knew what the Jews were. And now, under Soviet control, they really knew. So this isn't done unless you really have a reason to do it.

It's a savagery that comes from years of oppression and silent. So, again, an argument from Sysheer, the argument from silence, no evidence for responsibility, no fat not found on the circuit, you can report from the air. Well, that doesn't mean it didn't happen. And of course, the Tartars were doing it. The Tartyrs had a tendency to be a little bit poor in Crimea. They tend to be very strongly pro-Russian, pro-Russian monarchy, pro-Russian nationalists. and Crimea, as we all know, was going to be the center of, in northern Ukraine, the center of Nukazaria, but which there was an attempt to do that, but it failed miserably.

So Solomon Swartz is not really an authority, I would say. But in my book, I go into detail about what the OUN really was, the various Ukrainian nationalist groups, the relations with Germans and what their ideology was. Again, I disagree with Putin's, you know, they're all just neo-Nazis. It's not true, or Nazis, I should say, at the time, neo-Nazis now. It simply isn't true. I firmly believe that every ethnic group has a right to its own state if they want it, so long as they're self-consciously aware of it.

There's legitimate history behind it. And whenever that's crushed, especially for a long period of time, especially in the way that the Soviets did it, there is no other explanation except this kind of extreme violence of a heavily Jewish NKVD against the local population. Regarding indigenous Russian regions occupied by the Germans, the Germans could not exploit anti-Russian sentiments and the argument about Moscow's imperialism was unsustainable. and the argument for any Judeo-Bulsivism, devoid of support and local nationalism, largely lost its appeal. Among the local Russian population, only relatively few people actively supported the Germans in their anti-Jewish policies of extermination. That's all the quote. Yeah, it's all a quote. These are all reports, or at least they come from reports from the Germans.

Sorry, yeah, from the Germans that were not meant to be published. and a lot of them are purely anecdotal. They're useful information, but they're not the last word on the subject. A researcher on the fate of Soviet Jewry concludes, the Germans in Lithuania and Latvia had a tendency to mask their programmist activities, bringing to the four extermination squads made up of pogromous emerging under German patronage from the local population. But in Belarusia and to a considerable extent, even in Ukraine, and especially in the occupied areas of the R-SFSR, the Germans did not succeed as the local population had mostly disappointed the hopes pinned on it, and there the Nazi exterminators had to proceed openly.

Yeah, well, there's he saying two different things here. Local Russian population wanted to work directly under the Germans. That makes some sense. I also want to point to my talk on Lakot. I don't want to mention this before the experimental National Socialist community in the forest

of Bryansk not too far away from what we're talking about here and in studying that you get to know how all of this worked and from a non- anecdotal point of view I did it I did it years ago and then I redid it with some new information

a few weeks ago in a lecture form on radio albion. So this is, you know, this stuff has been interesting, interested in me since I was a kid. But remember what Solzhen Ethan said very early on, you know, Russians in the interior didn't have the interaction with Jews as Ukrainians would. as the Poles would, as the Belarusans would. So, and many of those Jews anyway had been removed. I have the feeling that the worst of them, those who were guilty, as the other paragraph said, had been taken out anyway.

And all of those left was, you know, people who, you know, maybe old people, people, people who didn't want to leave. And so there was really no reason for it. No, it was communist. that they were worried about, not an ethnic group. Hitler's plan for the military campaign against the Soviet Union, Operation Bargarvara Rosa included special tasks to prepare the ground for political rule, with the character of these tasks stemming from the all-out struggle between the two opposing political systems.

In May and June, 1941, the Supreme Command of the Vermacht issued more specific directions, ordering execution without trial a person suspected of hostile action against Germany, and of all political commissars, partisan, saboteurs, and Jews in any case in the theater of Barbarossa. Yes. I want to make clear that Stalin had repudiated the rules of war once this started. Germany invaded with every disadvantage. Political rule, I can't, there was no way they could take it, I don't think, or hold it.

they didn't have the resources, they didn't have the tanks, they didn't have no long-range bombers at all. They lost control of the skies. But at least at this period, using probably a lot of captured weaponry, you know, they were simply giving back what Stalin was doing to Germans. They didn't want to give Stalin an advantage. and this is true what is written here. But it would have been a little different if Stalin hadn't repudiated the rules of war

and his men absolutely followed along. To carry out special tasks in the territory of the USSR, four special groups, Einstein's Groupen, were established within the security service, SS and the Secret Police Gestapo, that had operational units, Einstein's commando, numerically equal to companies.

The Einzsgruppen advanced along the front units of the German army, but reported directly to the chief of security of the Third Reich, Reinhardt-Hydrich. Einstein's Group in A, about 1,000 soldiers and SS officers under the command of SS Stantan Fuhrer, Dr. F. Stoliker, sorry, of Army Group North, operated in Lithuania, Estonia and the Leningrad and Skof Oblasts. Group B, 655 men under the command of Brigandin, Brigham, Fu, was attached to Army Group Center, which was advancing through Bailorosia and the Smolensk Oblast toward Moscow. Group C, 600, Stendenfur, E. Rush, was attached to Army Group South and operated in the Western and Eastern Ukraine. Group D, 600 men under the command

of SS Stundt and Furr, Professor Oll Ollendorf, was attached to the 11th Army and operated in the Southern Ukraine, the Crimea, and in the Krasnodar and Staphropold regions. So what were these groups? These groups were irregular forces. They knew that they were going to have to deal with partisans, not regular army, but guerrilla fighters. These were counterinsurgency. That's what they did. And, you know, Soviet partisans were excellent in what they did. They were well-financed and heavily, heavily Jewish, far more so than the army. Here it was more institutionalized. I think it was institutionalized in the Soviet Union, too.

but um um and you look at the look at the numbers here there's not that many that's always the case with a gorilla grillas you know they they do what they do because they can't get what they want under normal conditions and not that many of them uh there's only a handful of these guys compared with the what you know three three million that invaded um they were there to protect uh uh supply you know supply you know supply fly lines, they were there to protect the power, things that normally aren't defended, and partisans were there to destroy anything they could. And that's what their purpose was. They were an irregular force, a guerrilla force, that was to match Stalin's partisans.

Extermination of Jews and commissars, carriers of the Judeo-Bolshevik ideology, by the Germans began from the first days of the June 1941 invasion, though they did so somewhat chaotically and with an extremely broad scope. In other German occupied countries, elimination of the Jewish population proceeded gradually and thoroughly. It usually started with legal restrictions, continued with the creation of ghettos and introduction of forced labor, and culminated in deportation and mass extermination. In Soviet Russia, all these elements were strangely intermingled in time and place. In each region, sometimes even within one city, various methods of harassment were used.

there was no uniform or standardized system. Shooting in Jewish prisoners of war could happen sometimes right upon capture and sometimes later in the concentration camps. Civilian Jews were sometimes first confined in ghettos, sometimes in forced labor camps, and in other places they were shot outright on the spot. And still in other places, the gas vans were used. As a rule, the place of execution was an anti-tank ditch or just a pit. I'm very happy that they that he realizes that the whole gas van idea well I'm assuming that these gas vans are German the gas vans use diesel not the gasoline

that the Soviets used Soviets had pioneered the gas fans diesel fumes are not are not as nearly as deadly as gasoline So, but so that's that's one thing to note. The commissars, partisans, these are ideologically motivated Jews. Isn't just some, you know, like your dentist here, my accountant, my next door neighbor. It's not, that's not what we're talking about. These are ideologically motivated Jews connected with the USSR. ordered to

ultimately order to destroy any nationalist resistance Solon killed prisoners of war every day of his life by order or it was simply sent to the gulag you know we know a few

you know general what's his name who was Paulus when he was captured he turned a traitor but And there was no overwhelming. There's no overwhelming. It's not institutionalized here.

It was simply done as a matter of course for the survival of the German army. So he's throwing out a lot of things here. The commissars who were Jewish, remember this is the political side of the army. We talked about a few times before. They were just eliminated because they were told to eliminate Germans at the first moment they came across them. And of course, no one had respect for the men who stood behind the Soviet lines. So we talk about harassment.

And again, there's nothing, lots of ethnic groups in Russia were harassed right now. There's nothing special about the Jewish side. This had more to do with the support of Stalin than it had to do with them being of a specific DNA. The numbers of those exterminated in the cities of the Western USSR by the winter of 1941, the first period of extermination, are striking.

According to the documents, in Vilnius, out of 57,000 Jews who had lived there, about 40,000 were killed, and Riga out of 33,000, 27,000, in Minsk out of 100,000 strong ghetto, in Minsk out of 100,000 strong ghetto,

24,000 were killed. killed. There, the extermination continued until the end of occupation. In Rofno, out of 27,000 Jews, 21,000 were killed in Mogulov, about 10,000 Jews were shot in Vitebsk, up to 20,000 and near Kislevich, Kislevich, Kislevich, village, nearly 20,000 Jews from Burbosk were killed in Berdovich, 15,000. I'm not going to say anymore. I got to be in my best behavior. I promised you. By late September, the Nazis staged a mass extermination of Jews in Kiev. On September 26, they distributed announcements around the city requiring all Jews under the penalty to report to various assembly points.

And Jews having no other option but to submit gathered obediently, if not trustingly, all together about 34,000. And on September 29th and 30th, they were metatically shot at Babayar, putting layer upon layer of corpses in a large ravine. Hence, there was no need to dig any graves, a giant hecatom. According to the official German announcement, not questioned later, 33,771 Jews were shot over the course of two days during the next two years of the Kiev occupation. The Germans continued shootings in their favorite and so convenient ravine. It is believed that the number of executed not only had reached perhaps 100,000. Don't say anything.

Don't say anything. All right. All right. I'm a good boy. It's all right. The executions at Babi-R have become a symbol in world history. People shrug at the cold-blooded calculation, the business-like organization. I'm holding back, too.

It's tough. I know. It's difficult. It's difficult. So typical for the 20th century that crowns humanistic civilization during the savage middle ages, people killed each other en masse only in a fit of rage or in the heat of battle. It should be recalled that within a few kilometers from Babiard, in the enormous Darnetsky camp, tens of thousands Soviet prisoners of war, soldiers, and officers died during the same months,

yet we do not commemorate it properly, and many are not even aware of it. The same is true about the more than two million Soviet prisoners of war who perished during the first years of the war. The catastrophe persistently raked its victims from all this occupied Soviet. Yeah, go ahead. The Germans didn't have the supplies for them. They were incapable of, you know, their ammunition was so low. Their fuel was so low.

You know, people talk about the baton death march. Yeah, the Japanese guards were starving too. You know, they simply didn't have this, this wasn't done out of, out of, you know, savagery. This was done because they simply couldn't maintain them. What were they supposed to do? You know, this was normal for Stalin. But people think that Germany was this, you know, incredibly powerful nation in 1941 with all the huge production of ammunition and tanks and it. It wasn't.

And ammunition was strictly rationed. And so, you know, this is, that's all I have to say. The catastrophe persistently raked its victims from all the occupied Soviet territories. In Odessa on October 17, 1941, on the second day of occupation by German and Romanian troops, several thousand Jewish males were killed. And later, after the bombing of the Romanian military office, the total terror was unleashed. About 5,000 people, most of them Jews and thousands of others were herded into a suburban village and executed there. In November,

there was a mass deportation of people into the Domenevsky district where about 55,000 Jews were shot in December in January of 1942. In the first months of occupation by the end of 1941, 22,464 Jews were killed in Kersan and Nikolaev. 11,000 in Denedet, pro-pest, I could never pronounce that one, 8,000 in Maripal and almost as many in Kremlinchug, about 15,000. in Karkoff's Drubskyy, Yarr, and more than 20,000 in Simferopol and Western Crimea. By the end of 1941, the German high command had realized that the Blitz had failed and that a long war loomed ahead. The needs of the war economy demanded a different organization of the home front. In some places, the German administration slowed down the extermination Jews in order to exploit their manpower and skills. As a result, ghettos survived in large cities like Riga, Vilnius, Karnas,

Baranovichi, Minsk, and in other smaller ones, where many Jews worked for the needs of the German economy. Yet the demand for labor that prolonged the existence of these large ghettos did not prevent resumption of mass killings in other places in the spring of 1942. In Western Belarusia, Western Ukraine, Southern Russia, the Crimea, 30,000 Jews were deported from the Grodnau, Regents to Treblinka and Auschwitz, Jews of Polesia, Pinsk, Brezlovsk, and, Smolensk were eradicated during the 1942 summer offensive. The Germans killed local Jews immediately upon arrival. The Jews of Kislosk appear. I can't pronounce you. Go ahead. We're killed in anti-tank ditches near Minerelli Voddy, thus died evacuees to Ascentuki from Leningrad and Kishenev. Jews of Kirch and Stavropo were exterminated as well. and Rostafandand,

recaptured by the Germans in July, 1942, all the remaining Jewish population was eradicated by August 11th. Are we to assume that these are civilians? I mean, that's the implication. But, you know, there were so many levels of bureaucracy in the Soviet military in the Soviet system.

It just says Jews, not what they did or who they were. But, you know, Hitler knew, as did all of its high command, that there was no chance of victory if the first push didn't win. And the first push wasn't going to win. The point was to blunt the force of the USSR, so it couldn't invade and take most of Europe. That was the entire point of the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. That was the entire point. Germany was in no position to do it.

We talked about the tank deficit. We talked about the planes deficit, the fuel deficit, the ammunition deficit. They only started making a truly heavy tank in 1944. How are they going to hold these areas? You know, their communication system or their supply system, you know, was so difficult. The railways were always so packed. and with nothing but chaos, you know, it was very difficult. Everything had to be done by air.

So, you know, those are just things to keep in mind here when you're reading this. In 1943, after the battles of Stalingrad and Kursk, the outcome of the war became clear. During the retreat, the Germans decided to exterminate all remaining Jews. On June 21st, 1943, Himmler ordered the liquidation of the remaining ghettos. In June, 1943, the ghettos of Lavov, Turnipol, and Drahobish were liquidated. After the liberation of Eastern Galicia in 1944, only 10,000 to 12,000 Jews were still alive,

which constituted about 2% of all Jews who had remained under occupation. Abel-bodied Jews from ghettos in Minsk, Lita, and Vilnius were transferred to concentration camps in Poland, Estonia, Latvia, while the rest were shot. Later during the summer, 1944, retreat from the Baltic, some of the Jews in these camps were shot, and some were moved to camps in Germany. Well, when it comes to Himmler, you know, you got to believe it because he really was that way. He was a tremendous organizer, but he would order this, even at the expense of his own war effort. So that's something I got to give it to.

I got to say, okay, that's probably true. Destined for extermination Jews fought for survival. Underground groups sprang up in many ghettos to organize escapes. Yet after a successful breakout, a lot dependent on the local residence. that they'd not betray the Jews, provide them with non-Jewish papers, shelter, and food. In the occupied areas, Germans sentenced those helping Jews to death. But everywhere in all occupied territories, there were people who helped the Jews, yet there were few of them. They risked their lives and the lives of their families.

There were hundreds, maybe thousands of such people, but the majority of local populations just watched from a distance. I mean, what else could they do? They were trying to survive on their own. In Bailorosia and the occupied territories of the RSFSR, where local populations were not hostile to the remaining Jews and where no pogroms ever occurred, the local population provided still less assistance to Jews than in Europe and even in Poland, the country of widespread traditional folk anti-Semitism. Summaries of many similar testimonials can be found in books by S. Schwartz and I. Arad. They plausibly attribute this not. not only to the fear of execution, but also to the habit of obedience to authorities developed over the years of Soviet rule and to not meddling in the affairs of others. Yes, we have been so downtrodden, so many millions have been torn away from our midst in previous decades at any attempt that resistance to government power was foredoomed.

So now Jews as well could not get the support of the population. Belarus lost half of its population. Slavic, whatever. The Soviet Union's population plummeted. That's what I'm going to say. But even well-organized Soviet underground and guerrillas directed from Moscow did little to save the doomed Jews. Relations with the Soviet guerrillas were especially acute problem for the Jews in the occupied territories going into the woods, i.e., joining up with a partisan unit. was a better lot for Jewish men than waiting to be exterminated by the Germans.

Yet hostility to the Jews was widespread and often acute among partisans, and there were some Russian detachments that did not accept Jews on principle. They alleged that Jews cannot and do not want to fight, writes a former Jewish partisan Moisa Kaganovich. A non-Jewish guerrilla recruit was supplied with weapons, but a Jew was required to provide his own, and sometimes it was traded down. Quote, There is pervasive enmity to Jews among partisans.

In some detachments, anti-Semitism was so strong that the Jews felt compelled to flee from such units. Could that have anything to do with the fact that everyone knew that Jews were the overwhelming among the Bolsheviks and basically among the Soviets? No, no, it had nothing to do with it. We know that. That's what I figured. I'm a professional historian. For instance, in 1942, some 200 Jewish boys and girls fled into the woods from the ghetto in the Stedal of Mir in Grodnau Oblast, and there they encountered anti-Semitism among Soviet guerrillas, which led to the death of many who fled.

Only some of them were able to join guerrilla squads. Or in other case, a guerrilla squad under the command of Gunzenko operated near Minsk. It was replenished, mainly with fugitives from the Minsk ghetto, but the growing-nizabeth. but the growing number of Jews in the unit triggered anti-Semitic clashes, and then the Jewish part of the detachment broke away. Such actions on the part of the guerrillas were apparently spontaneous, not directed from the center. According to Mojsa Kaganovich, from the end of 1943,

the influence of more disciplined personnel arriving from the Soviet Union had increased, and the general situation for the Jews had somewhat improved. However, he complains that when a territory was liberated by the advocating the advancing regular Soviet troops and the partisans were sent to the front, which is true and everybody was sent indiscriminately. It was primarily Jews who were sent, and that is incredible. You know what this reminds me of? When I was in college, even a little bit in grad school, you have a professor who's pontificating on something, and you know so much is wrong. But especially if you're new, you know, you can't constantly be contradicting them.

You don't want to be that guy. That's how I got through, actually, because I was a nice guy. Later on, they knew. That's the key, by the way. But, you know, as a young student, you had to kind of just sit and listen. I'd ask an occasional question, you know, a pointed question. That's about it. But the same feeling in the pity of your stomach that I had listening to these characters

is the same I have right now. However, Kaganovich writes that the Jews were sometimes directly assisted by the partisans. There were even partisan attacks on small towns in order to save Jews from ghettos and camps, and that Russian partisan movement helped fleeing Jews to cross the front lines. And in this way, they smuggled across the front line many thousands of Jews who were hiding in the forest of Western Belarusia, escaping the carnage. A partisan force in the Shernigov region accepted more than 500 children from Jewish families in the woods. protected them and took care of them. After the Red Army liberated Sarni on Boland, several squads broke the front and sent

Jewish children to Moscow. Esch Schwartz believes that these reports are greatly exaggerated, but they are based on real facts and merit attention. Yeah, Schwartz just wants everyone to think that everyone hates Jews for no reason, including the Soviets, no matter how many Jews are in the system. He just is losing it. I don't know where he was at this point. If he was in the West, I think he probably was.

But that was his whole thing that, you know, even the Soviets hate us, you know. And I've come across him way too much, Solomon Swartz's. I come across him way too much. And he just was, I'm sure he was as a very unpleasant person in general. But again, I'll just simply note that supplies for German forces, forces were at a minimum at this point. And of course, the Soviets, thanks to only their own system, which was untouched, because the Germans had no long-range bombers.

Their faculties and factories and Urals were totally untouched, plus the Americans and everyone else sending supplies up through Persia. they had more than they could ever need. This is, you know, one of the, it's an old myth. The history buffs, you know, like to talk about, boomer history buffs like to talk about this. You know, like, stupid things like, you know, the snow broke the German army, which of course, is false. But the Germans were never in a position to invade the U.S. are. They were barely in a position to invade Poland. And it's not just Joachim Hoffman. You know,

of course, Icebreaker says this. And of course, Suvadov says it in great detail, using every, you know, every word is cited in the main culprit. The ammunition was, you had to be extremely careful. In any squad, your squad leader was in control of where the ammo, uh, went and you could not shoot unless there was a military target to shoot at at this point and probably even earlier remember the Soviets I mean sorry the Germans stopped close to Moscow not because they were beaten back or anything it was because they ran out of gas they ran out of ammo they ran out of supplies Germany was was not was not prepared for an invasion of this type this was a tank war

and the Soviets as I said before had more amphibious tanks and the Germans had tanks in total what did we say something like the 30,000 Soviet tanks versus 4,500 German tanks fighting each other and that wasn't changed until late in the war

and many of the German tanks were not prepared or not armed for the far more advanced Soviet tanks. And once you get that in mind, a lot of this starts sounding a little, okay, you know what I mean? Yeah, I'm going to, there's a break coming up that I'm probably just going to read straight through before. It's on the next page. So you tell me you shut up?

Well, I mean, there's not much to talk about here. Jewish family camps originated among the Jewish masses fleeing into the, woods and there were many I mean this is he's just go he's just basically parroting legend at this point yeah okay well we don't even have to jewish family camps originated among the jewish masses fleeing into the woods and there were many thousands of such fugitives purely jewish armed squads were formed specifically for the protection of these camps weapons were purchased through third parties from german soldiers or policemen yet how to feed them all the only way was to take food as well as shoes and clothing, both male and female, by force from the peasants of

surrounding villages. The peasant was placed between the hammer and the anvil, if he did not carry out his assigned production minimum. The Germans burned his household and killed him as a partisan. On the other hand, guerrillas took from him by force all they needed, and this naturally caused spite among the peasants. They are robbed by the Germans and robbed by the guerrillas, and now, in addition, even the Jews robbed them, and the Jews even take away clothes from their women. In the spring of 1943, partisan Baruch Levin came to one such family camp, hoping to get medicines for his sick comrades. He remembers Tuvia Belski seemed like a legendary hero to me.

Coming from the people, he managed to organize a 1,200 strong unit in the woods. In the worst days when a Jew could not even feed himself, he cared for the sick, elderly, and for the babies born in the woods. Levin told Tuvia about Jewish partisans. We, the few survivors, no longer value love. life. Now the only meaning of our lives is revenge. It is our duty to fight the Germans, wipe out all of them to the last one. I talked for a long time, offered to teach Belski's people how to work with explosives and all other things I have myself learned, but my words, of course,

could not change Chuvia's mindset. Peruk, I would like you to understand one thing. It is precisely because there are so few of us left, it is so important for me that the Jews survive. and I see this is my purpose. It is the most important thing to me. And the very same Mojshikaganovich as late as in 1956 wrote in a book published in Buenos Aires in peacetime years after the devastating defeat in Nazism shows, shows, according to Solomon Schwartz, a really bloodthirsty attitude toward the Germans, an attitude that seems to be influenced by the Hitler plague.

He glorifies putting German prisoners to Jewish death by Jewish partisans, according to the horrible Nazi examples, or excitedly recalls the speech by a commander of a Jewish guerrilla unit given before the villagers of a Lithuanian village who were gathered and forced to kneel by partisans in the square after a punitive raid against a village whose population had actively assisted the Germans in the extermination of Jews, several dozen villagers were executed during that raid. Solomon Schwartz writes about this with a restrained but clear condemnation. Yes, a lot of things happened. predatory killings call for revenge, but each act of revenge tragically plants the seeds of new

retribution in the future. Are we done? We're done. Look, to some extent, I don't think Solzhenit doesn't understand the fact that by going through all of this, remember, he was a Soviet artilleryman. He was fighting the German invasion and was captured. And apparently was treated fine, which is why he was set into prison. But by adding these things, it's not going to remove the effect that the other things that he

talked about had on the Jewish reader. It's not going to matter. I don't know if that's his motivation here or not. Or maybe he doesn't care. If you've been to the gulag with cancer, you're not scared of anything. nothing's good nothing could be worse than that so you're not really scared of anything

but whatever his motivation is here and don't forget for a long time he was peppered with you know Soviet propaganda was a tremendous loss of life it maybe wasn't clear to him about the Soviet invasion plans

because that was that obviously wasn't talked about you know, we're going to give it to him. Solentin's one of us. Always has been. We have to give it to him, though. From the Russian point of view, this stuff looks bad. The massive, massive population loss, especially in the West. This is one reason why you have Russian nationalists still supporting Stalin,

which is an awful thing, terrible thing to do. Stalin was not a nationalist. Solomon was not Orthodox. He was nothing of a kind. And yet he's treated that way. In 1944, he created this new church, the Moscow Patriarchate from people who would listen to him. And again, I don't blame those bishops. You know, what would happen to them if they said no? I don't blame them. We probably don't do the same thing if we were in their position. and if you read, as I've said before, the journal of the Moscow Patriarchate, it's awful how they praise and worship Stalin as a victor, as a Voivod, is their favorite word.

So, you know, a lot of this gets, it gets very complicated and mashed up. But it ultimately comes down to the fact that it really was only General Grigorenko. Peter Gregorenko, who publicly said that you were planning an invasion of Central Europe, that's why the Germans did this. And he was sent to the Far East Command and then to a mental institution where he was damaged very badly and then sent to the U.S.

They weren't going to kill him. He was two, you had four stars on his. And he was in this war. So that wouldn't have been a good idea. So they did everything else. to him, though. You had plenty of Soviet officers who knew and said something, but it doesn't surprise me that someone, you know, like Solzhenies, didn't really realize the massive supplies that were being piled up on the border of Central Europe after their invasion of Poland, and now they

had a border with Germany. And the other thing to keep in mind with all of this is the German supply problems. It came to a point where even German planes weren't coming in sending things anymore. That's all they had. They didn't have the railroads anymore. German soldier and DeGreille talks about this was suffering like I can't even imagine. One retreat after another, knowing full well that this isn't going to go well until he gets back to Germany even then.

And it's unfortunate that FDR, of course, that Stalin insistence said, you know, there's not going to be a conditional surrender. It's going to be an unconditional surrender, which means we have to destroy you completely, and then we'll allow you to surrender. And that was something I think was unknown at the time. I don't know if there's been such a thing as an unconditional surrender before, before 1945. I could be wrong.

But they knew Gregorenko was right. And being a general, a high-ranking, a high-general officer who knew, knew who was part of it to come out and say, this is why. This is why the incompetence so early on. It wasn't really incompetence. It was a you're on a typical offensive footing. You provoked this, which took a lot of balls to say. Now, of course, this is much later.

This is years later. And the books out there now, it's, it's, I can't imagine any, honest person will reject the thesis of Icebreaker at this point. Academics will because they have no choice. But, you know, the overwhelming evidence that's brought out by Suvadov and Hoffman and now, you know, a hundred others is such that you have to believe it now. That's exactly what was going on. And Stalin, more than anyone else on the planet, except maybe a few German generals, knew

the severe supply problems in the German army. They were out of fuel after a few weeks in the invasion of Poland. You know, again, with the tanks, everything else, they had fuel coming from one source. And a lot of this is Mussolini's fault.

Never been a fan of his. He forced the Germans to intervene in Greece to save him after a stupid invasion that he lost, forced to intervene again in North Africa. trying to create his new Roman Empire where he lost there too. Fighting now on what, three fronts?

I'm telling him, one of the big takeaways from World War II, and I'll keep saying this, I don't care how many times, when Mussolini fell, that was a victory for the Axis, not for the Allies. That's all I have to say. All right, everybody go over to the show notes and go over to the description in the videos and donate to Dr. Johnson's work. by his new book on this Russia-Ukraine quote-unquote conflict. It will be like no other one that you are going to read on the subject.

And that's one of the many ways that you can support the work he's doing. So please go do that. And as always, thank you, Dr. Johnson. Thank you. I always have a great time doing these. Despite the fit in my stomach. I'll see you next time. Take care.

All right, man. Bye. Yeah, yeah, I know, I know. Me too. Bye. Go get the turf. I want to welcome everyone back to our reading of 200 years together by Alexander Solzhenycin. This is episode number 105. Dr. Johnson, how are you doing today? I'm doing okay. I have to warn my listeners. The cats have been particularly, you know, I have seven of them, and they sometimes play way too hard. And it turns into a fight. I have to stop it.

So nothing worse happens. You know, that's really Stanley's job, but sometimes he's sleep through it, believe it or not. And, you know, still, it's mostly the kittens that do that. So just in case, just, you know, it's a, it's a warning ahead of time. Has anyone ever called you like a crazy cat dad, like they call women crazy cat ladies? They should, if they haven't. Because when I was single, I had, I think I had five at one point, including Stanley and Marcel. Yeah, they really should say that, but they don't, they don't.

You got a T-shirt around here somewhere that says that. Yeah, I have, I have three myself. So it's, and I've always had like one. or at least one or two. So, yeah. Yep. Anyway, here we go. Let's finish this chapter out because this chapter has caused me, caused me agita at parts.

Adjada. Yes, people from New York use that word. People out here don't know what that word means. I didn't realize that. My mother used that word. Everyone in my neighborhood used that word. It doesn't really have a firm definition. But out here,

certainly in the Midwest. No one has any idea what you're talking about. I think it's supposed to mean like heartburn or something, but really it's just to stand in for I'm thoroughly sickened by what I'm doing. Yeah, it's just, it's a combination of, you know, stress. I can't take it anymore. Yeah, I'm sick of it. I'm starting to feel it in my, in my heart.

It's a general, generalized, you know, non-scientific term. used only in one place. One place. New York, New Jersey, in Connecticut. Yeah, I grew up with it. And I didn't know. I used it all the times. You know the only answer to you're causing me.

With a what? I didn't realize they didn't know. All right, here we go. The different Jewish sources variously estimate the total losses among Soviet Jews during the Second World War within the post-war borders. How many Soviet Jews survived the war? asked S. Schwartz and offers us in calculation, 1.8 million to 1.9 million, excluding former refugees from the Western Poland and Romania now repatriated. The calculations

imply that the number of Jews by the end of the war was markedly lower than the 2 million and much lower than the almost universally accepted number of 3 million. So the total number of losses according to Schwartz was 2.8 to 2.9 million. In 1990, I. I.R. had provided his estimate, quote, during the liberation of German occupied territories, the Soviet army met almost no Jews. Out of the 2.7 and 2.9 million Jews who remained under the Nazi rule in the occupied Soviet territories almost all died. To this figure, Arad suggests adding about 120,000 Jews, Soviet army soldiers who died on the front, and about 80,000 shot in the POW camps, and tens of thousands of Jews who died during the siege of Leningrad, Odessa, and other cities, and in the deep rear

because of harsh living conditions in the evacuation. Demographer M. Kupovetsky published several studies in the 1990s where he used newly available archival materials, made some corrections to older data, and employed an improved technique for ethno-demographic analysis. His result was at the general losses of Jewish population within the post-war USSR borders in 1941 and 1945 amounted to 2.7 million, 1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.5. amounted to 2.7 million, 1.1 million Eastern and 1.6 million Western, or 55% of 4.965 million. The total number of Jews in the USSR in June 1941.

The military, apart from the victims of Nazi extermination, including the losses among the military and the guerrillas, among civilians near the front line during evacuation's deportation, as well as the victims of Stalin's camps during the war. However, the author notes that quantitative evaluation of each of these categories within the overall casualty figure is yet to be done. Apparently, the short Jewish encyclopedia agrees with this assessment as it provides the same number. Short Jewish encyclopedia picked the highest number. I'm completely shocked. Yeah. Yeah, just keep going.

The currently accepted figure for the total losses of the Soviet population during the Great Patriotic War is 27 million. if the method of demographic balance is used, it is $26.6 million. And this may still be underestimated. We must not overlook that the war was for the Russians. The war rescued not only their country, not only Soviet Jewry, but also the entire social system of the Western world from Hitler. Had that work out. Yeah.

Thank God we saved the West from Hitler. Thank God we saved the West from Hitler. Everybody with a transgender kid is just so high. happy about the way the war went. This war exacted such sacrifice from the Russian people that its strength and health have never since fully recovered. The war overstrained the Russian

people. It was yet another disaster on top of the Civil War and decal accusation and from which the Russian people have almost run dry. Well, as far as the casualty numbers and everything, as far as the overall, you know, that's probably true.

I want to point out that a lot of the casualties were in by the commissars, by the rearguard formations that shot anyone who retreated, and that the invasion didn't happen for no reason. It didn't do this for fun. It was to prevent an invasion of at least Central Europe, taking Germany's oil supply, which is mostly Romania. and that's the only reason it was the invasion was able to keep going. By the time the Germans came to the outskirts of Moscow, it stopped because they didn't have anything. The German tanks, you know, had to be refitted all the time. They had to be repaired.

They weren't prepared for this kind of thing. The Soviets, however, were. but so Hitler had you know I don't think he thought he was going to win maybe he was going to gain concessions but I don't think that he believed at all that he was going to win and there was very good reason for that the ruthless and unrelenting catastrophe which was gradually devouring Soviet Jewry and a multitude of exterminating events all over the occupied lands was part of a greater catastrophe designed to eradicate the entire European Jewry. As we examine only the events in Russia, the catastrophe as a whole is not covered in this book.

Yet the countless miseries having befallen on both our peoples, the Jewish and the Russian in the 20th century and the unbearable weight of the lessons of history and gnawing anxiety about the future make it impossible not to share, if only briefly, some reflections about how it, reflections of mine and others, and impossible. not to examine how the high Jewish minds look at the catastrophe from the historical perspective and how they attempt to encompass and comprehend it. It is for a reason that the catastrophe is always written with a capital letter. It was an epic event for such an ancient and historical people.

It could not fail to arouse the strongest feelings and a wide variety of reflections and conclusions among the Jews. In many Jews, long ago assimilated and distance from their own people, the catastrophe reignited a more distinct and intense sense of their Jewishness. Yet, for many, the catastrophe became a proof that God is dead. If he had existed, he certainly would never have allowed Auschwitz. Then there is an opposite reflection. Recently, a former Auschwitz inmate said, in the camps, we were given a new Torah, though we have not been able to read it yet.

An Israeli author states with conviction, quote, The catastrophe happened because we did not follow the covenant and did not return to our land. we had to return to our land to rebuild the temple. Still such an understanding is achieved only by a very few, although it does permeate the entire Old Testament. You know, you do have Jews, and I've known some of them, the more strictly Orthodox who really blame themselves, that their presence, their foreign presence,

or this is obviously a Zionist here, the whole point of Zionism was that they were foreigners in a Christian land. You know, when you read the founding documents of Zionism, you see this all the time. There's a good reason for anti-Semitism. It doesn't come from nothing. We're like oil and water. And because nothing was done, the catastrophe occurred. You have many different reactions.

to this mass casualty event. But like this is the only group of people who made it actually a part of their religion. When he says it's a new Torah, he's not kidding. This is almost in a literal sense. Some have developed and still harbor a bitter feeling. Oh my God. You think? All right, let me read that again.

Some have developed and still harbor a bitter feeling. Quote, once humanity turned away from, us. We weren't a part of the West at the time of the catastrophe. The West rejected us, cast us away. We are as upset by the nearly absolute indifference of the world and even of non-European jury to the plight of the Jews and the fascist countries as by the catastrophe in Europe itself. What a great guilt lies on the democracies of the world in general and especially on the Jews and the democratic countries. The pogrom in Kishnev was an insignificant crime compared to the German atrocities to the methodically implemented plan of extermination of millions of Jewish lives, and yet

Kishinev pogrom triggered a bigger, bigger protest. Even the Bayliss trial in Kiev attracted more worldwide attention. Yeah, just keep reading. But this is unfair. After the world realized the essence and scale of the destruction, the Jews experienced consistent and energetic support and passionate compassion from many nations. Some contemporary Israelis recognize, as this and even warn their compatriots against any such excesses. Quote, gradually, the memory of the catastrophe ceased to be just a memory. It has become the ideology of the Jewish state. The memory of the catastrophe turned into a religious devotion, into the state cult.

The state of Israel has assumed the role of an apostle of the cult of the catastrophe, the role of a priest who collects routine tithes from other nations, and woe to those who refuse to pay that tithe. And in conclusion, the worst legacy of Nazism for Jews, as the Jews' role of a super victim. Yeah, you've seen this. This is a Turric-Cartis position. It's very important to note this.

I know that there are people who claim that the main focus of the Israeli settlement in Palestine was the Old Testament, or what they think the Old Testament is. It's not. This ideology comes first. when I get a chance I'm going to look up that footnote it sounds so much like Israel Shah Hoc but I don't think it is or I mean that could be yeah it does not yeah Finkelstein here's a similar excerpt for me I'm sorry go ahead Finkelstein was the first name that that occurred to me when I saw that

Shah Hoc didn't I kind of forgot for a second but I think you're I think you're right to someone like that. Here's a similar excerpt from yet another author. The cult of the catastrophe has filled a void in the souls of secular Jews. From being a reaction to an event of the past, the trauma of the catastrophe has evolved into a new national symbol, replacing all other symbols. And this mentality of the catastrophe is growing with each passing year.

If we do not recover from the trauma of Auschwitz, we will never become a normal nation. You know, they won't because this is the focus of their identity. Yeah, there's far more secular Jews and there are religious ones. And I think that division is over exaggerated anyway. But this is almost a spirituality in itself. It justifies their very existence. The sheer amount of money that went from Germany to the Israeli state.

the U.S., you know, Germany especially because they're paying reparations. And now when I was at the Barns Review, I came across the concept of the grandchildren of survivors as having, you know, I forget the exact term for it, but of feeling the same effects. and they too deserve reparations. So this is never going to end. No, they're not going to become a normal nation. They can't. It's beyond them.

And but that's a part of their identity anyway. Here is a similar excerpt from yet another author. The cult of the catastrophe. Okay, I read that already. Sorry. Among the Jews, the sometimes painful work of reexamining the catastrophe never ceases. Here is the opinion of an Israeli historian, a former inmate of a Soviet camp. Quote, I do not belong to the Jews who were inclined to blame the evil goyam for our national

misfortunes while casting ourselves as poor lambs or toys in the hands of others. Anyway, not in the 20th century. On the contrary, I fully agree with Hannah Arendt that the Jews of our century were equal participants of the historical games of the nations and the monstrous catastrophe that befell them was a result of not only evil plots of the enemies of mankind, but also of the huge fatal miscalculations on the part of the Jewish people themselves, their leaders, their activists. Well, as far as that goes, you had massive Jewish banker support for the USSR, both before its founding and at this point too, and then later on.

None of this would have happened, I think is kind of his point, without that support. I've read Hannah Arendt in great detail. I don't know specifically what he's referring to. But they're not blaming themselves either, except in the sense that the Soviet Union was an ethnic concept, was financed by that specific ethnicity. and there would have been no so-called fascism in Europe had the USSR not existed.

Indeed, Hannah Arendt was searching for the causes of the catastrophe in Jewry itself. Her main argument is that modern anti-Semitism was one of the consequences of the particular attitudes of the Jews towards a state and society in Europe, end quote. The Jews, quote, turned out to be unable to evaluate power shifts at a nation-state. in growing social contradictions. In the late 1970s, we read in Dan Levin's book, quote, on this issue, I agree with Professor Branover, who believes that the catastrophe was largely a punishment for our sins, including the sin of leading the communist movement.

There is something in it, end quote. Wow, wow, wow, wow, okay, all right. You do have a feeling right? That is sane. I can't believe it, but that is sane. I'm looking up the footnote on that is in Russian. I'm translating it right now. Dan Levin, it's called On the Edge of Temptation.

It's from an interview. If anybody wants to look that up who's listening. Okay. Yet no noticeable movement can be observed among world jury. To a great many contemporary Jews, such conclusions appear insulting and blasphemous. To the contrary, quote, the very fact that the catastrophe served as a moral justification for Jewish chauvinism. Lessons of the Second World War have been learned exactly contrary-wise.

The ideology of Jewish nationalism has grown and strengthened on the soil. This is terribly sad. A feeling of guilt and compassion toward the nation victims has become an indulgence, absolving the sin unforgivable for all others. It is hence comes the moral permissibility of the public appeals, to mix one's own ancient blood with the alien blood? Yeah, we all see the pictures of the wall around the Israeli border, how humongous it is. It's the most extreme version of nationalism for you, and nationalism for us, but internationalism for you.

And we all know where that comes from and why it exists. you know, when I was much younger, my worry, my concern was that they refer to it as the catastrophe. The capital, you know, the, that particular article, not a, you know, one among others, that this one has far more significance than anybody else. The mass, this is, you know, most of these combatants lost huge. numbers, especially of men, but in places like Japan and Germany, they lost a huge number of women and children, too, from allied bombing, which is not only considered acceptable, considered heroic today. You can't talk about any Jewish involvement with Gulam,

even though it obviously exists. There's only one. It's the. It's the. And that bothers me. I think it bothers a lot of people. And there's certain Jews, clearly, who it bothers too. Well, I looked up the footnote on that quote right there. It's called to the resounding call of blood or with self-awareness as a weapon by D. Kemmolnitsky. In the late 1890s, a Jewish publicist from Germany wrote, quote, today the moral capital of Auschwitz is already spent, end quote.

One year later, she stated, quote, solid moral capital gained by the Jews because of Auschwitz seems to be depleted. The Jews can no longer proceed along the old way by raising pretensions to the world. Today, the world already has the right to converse with the Jews as it does with all others. The struggle for the rights of Jews is no more progressive than a struggle for the rights of all other nations. It is high time to break the mirror and look around. We are not alone in this world. You know, every ethnic group has the right to self-determination.

I have no problem with that. I do have a problem with control over the foreign policy of powerful nations to keep yourself there, the total destruction of an ancient people to get yourself there and what they did, what the Zionists did to, you know, using poise. and gas and everything else they could to destroy the, break the Arab resistance, that's a different story. Of course, they have a right to self-determination like anyone else does. You know, we can't, we can't be like that. We can't make exceptions. But the religion of Auschwitz, as he's trying to say, gives the impression that that's okay. We're allowed to be

ethno-nationalists. You're not allowed to be. It would have been equally great for Russian minds to elevate themselves to similarly decent and benevolent self-criticism, especially in making judgments about Russian history of the 20th century, the brutality of the revolutionary period, the cowed indifference of the Soviet times, and the abominable plundering of the post-Soviet age, and to do it despite the unbearable burden of realization that it was we Russians who ruined our history,

through our useless rulers, but also through our own worthlessness, and despite the gnawing anxiety that this may be irredeastern, deemable to perceive the Russian experience as possibly a punishment from the supreme power? He's being vague there. He's being vague on purpose there. I'm not entirely sure what he means. I don't know what he means by we. The Soviet system was imposed on the USSR, on the Russian nation.

But there was the penetration of Freemasonry into the nobility. They struggle to control the court. I just did. I just did a lecture for Radio Albian. The entire church, with one or two exceptions, Russian Orthodox Church, either actively supported or was neutral concerning the February Revolution. They even call it the God-protected provisional government.

The Senate said this openly. It took a while for me. A lot of nationalists, but Russian Orthodox nationalists, whether converts or otherwise, have trouble. This makes them very uncomfortable. Many of them, of course, like Anthony Kravivsky, they repented of that later on.

And again, they couldn't have known what was going to happen, what they were setting up. But we Russians had to ruin our history. Well, you know, the peasants are not responsible for any of this. Yes, could the church have done more against even the provisional state? Yes, but how could they when there was this full support for? for it. They didn't say anything when their most traditional bishops were removed by Levov, who was the first revolutionary head of the synod. Yeah, in the provisional government, they wouldn't put up against the wall and shot like they were under the Bolsheviks. So there was one, actually some

discussion allowed. But it wasn't, you know, the provisional government was never about freedom. They were socialist revolutionaries. And this is, this is extremely important. it's a bit of a coincidence that we're talking about the exact same thing now. I just did this lengthy paper on the church's support of the war. Actually, I had to do it twice. Actually, let me read you the full... Let me find it here. It was March 9, 1917.

The full statement... of the Sin of the Russian Orthodox Church yeah had been purged but had been purged many times before here's what it said the will of God has been accomplished Russia has entered in the paths of new state life

may God bless our great homeland with happiness and glory on this new path for the sake of the many sacrifices offered to win civil freedom for the sake of the salvation of your own family for the sake of the happiness of the homeland abandoned at this great historical moment all quarrels and disagreements, unite and brotherly love for the good of Russia, trust the provisional

government, altogether, everyone individually. Apply all your efforts to descend by your labors, exploits and prayer, obedience, you may help it in its great work of introducing the new principles of state life. Yeah, you may have had quiet rejection of that. You may have had a lot a rejection of it, but it was quiet. Traditionalist bishops, like Kravivsky himself, were, you know, they weren't quite sure what to do. There were a lot of problems with this. You know, the abdication, they had no idea that the abdication document was a fraud.

We know it now. We could do analysis of it now. But in that paper, you know, and I'm not excusing anybody. but you know the media in Russia just prior to the revolution was absolutely yellow journalism

at its worst they used Rasputin to discredit the old state they made up stories about them that even the provisional government once it took power realized we're not true they thought this was a real

abdication remember the abdication note said to support this new government even though it was a Masonic state how many people knew that the leadership was a member of the lodge. I don't know.

They were supposed to be an elected assembly, electing a new monarch in the future. So they felt, okay, we can support this government that's going to elect a new monarch. Many of them thought that this was only temporary. Many of them didn't really know that much about leftist ideology to begin with. They thought that Rasputt really was a bad guy

when he was not. They were getting conflicting information or none at all. the left as always were lying about their intentions and keep in mind something else I'm the only one who talks about this 1917 the extreme PTSD of that population

millions had been killed at this point every family was suffering they're not going to be as rational as they would have in normal times and that's extremely important to note and then of course they worried about fear of retribution which as far as the provisional government was concerned was not nearly as as bad as the Bolsheviks but there was a concern

there was I think only one bishop that was retired just for rejecting the provisional government that was seraphim they negotiated with others and in fact in my paper which is 50 you know I am I can send you I will send you. And there's been a flurry of new information over the last five years,

especially in Russian, recently. I go through many of the major bishops as to what their thought process was. They didn't have the information that we do now. And remember, this was brand new to them. Absolutely brand new to them. So they never. lived under a, under, without a czar before. And there was a whole view in the Russian diaspora that not only the murder of Nicholas and his family, but the rise of the Bolsheviks were at least

in part because of stuff like this, that there was a decay in morals throughout Russian society. I have a paper that was put out, I think, by E. Michael Jones on the second. revolution amongst nobility in Petersburg. Peter the Great, of course, with a total to Zanzan, he started all of this. You know, almost, you know, Catherine I'm a second, almost

sexualized nobility. I have a paper out on Peter the Great's old drunken, madcap sobor which was a demonic mockery of Christianity, which a lot of people don't know about.

This is one of the reasons the old believers thought that he really was either Antichrist or a very Antichrist adjacent So but to say that we Russians ruined our history Well there are specific people who are responsible here It's not just we Russians

Sultan Eatson was in an artillery division In this red army because you know he had to be He didn't have much of a choice He would have been killed otherwise You know That was a case for most of the the most of the infantry. But the anti-royalist propaganda by 1917 had done its work.

And because of the phony abdication letter, which gave support either to Mikhail, who refused, and then, you know, the provisional government, you know, Monarchus could say, okay, he commanded it, so it'll be fine. Maybe he'll come back or someone else will be there, Nikolai Nikolivich or someone like that. You know, and so they were able to rationalize it to themselves. But I also want to say that there was a mass of resurgence of Russian Orthodox asceticism, or roughly around the turn of the, from like the American Civil War to outbreak of the First World War. a huge one.

But there's a reason that the old believers took over the peasantry. Old believers, I have a book out on the topic, of course, that I wrote many years ago. A lot of translations and stuff like that. I can't read all of the old orthography. That's really, the old Russian alphabet had, what, 131 letters? I don't understand any of that. But, you know, there was a good reason for that. but at least in this case

as far as the earlier revolution the first revolution was concerned and they should have learned their lesson from 1905 we talked about this already we know what these people are but people like well as Gianco Lavov

there was more than one by the way Levolve had people everywhere that family you know they didn't have the power to inform the ideology to start slaughtering people. They couldn't. So they negotiated instead.

Lenin, when they took over a few months later, very different story. There's no way they could have known that they were setting up for the Bolshevik coup later on and reduced the Russian Orthodox Church to almost nothing by the time Stalin took over. And I've said it a hundred times. There were constant uprisings, not just the white forces, but even after their defeat, there were constant peasant uprisings everywhere.

The Americans knew about them. They refused to support them. The first few years of Bolshevism could have easily been destroyed. Trotsky talks about it at great length. He knew that it wasn't going to happen. In fact, it was a provisional government that made sure that Trotsky was released from a Canadian prison to come to Russia. So there's specific people we could talk about here, people like, you know, Schiff and all of that. So there's no way they could have known what would have come from this, the provisional government.

government. They really believed naively that, okay, Nicholas II has resigned and said, look, look to, and refute was a bad guy, and look to this new government for, support them. And then what they're going to do is called an assembly and will elect in all Russian government. Well, that ridiculous assembly only permitted leftist parties to run for office. Turnout was like 27%. And it meant nothing. It was crushed anyway. The minute the Bolsheviks took over.

It meant absolutely nothing. We talked about the Duma and everything else. So it's not like we Russians have this, you know, Russian sins and the nobility in the urban areas. You read Dostaski, you read even Gogo earlier.

They talk about these sins constantly. They permitted a means for for the revolutionaries to move in. Yeah, Alexander III, he had a full hold over his court, which is hard to do. Nicholas II struggled a little bit. Rasputin was a good man.

He didn't want to be there. He was there to help the young boy. I mean, that was the only reason he was there. He would rather go back to his village in Siberia. They kept calling him back. He did not have control over. things. It's absolute nonsense. If he did, Russia would never have been a part of World War I. You had high-ranking people at the court of Nicholas II who wanted Russia to intervene in the Balkan wars,

starting in 1912. You know, this could have gotten much, much worse. But had they actually listened to him, there would have been no Russian intervention in World War I would not have existed. But Rasputin was the term, Rasputinite was often used as a synonym for monarchists, roughly around this time. So, you know, what he means here is vague. He's deliberately being vague. I understand, I think, what he means.

By our own worthlessness. Well, he certainly wasn't worthless. everyone's imperfect. So, yes, but, you know, it certainly doesn't, I don't think it calls for the Gulag state. That's just the nature of modern ideology. And, and frankly, Jewish domination. It was a Jewish state starting in late 1917. And it was well known, even abroad.

it. The Churchill talks about it. The British ambassador talks about it. So it's not like this is something that only a handful of nuts spoke of. So, yes, there are Russian sins that may have caused this.

It's embarrassing that so many Russian hierarchs didn't do much about the provisionals. And all kinds of, you know, the swirl of information was so chaotic. Plus, it was with war's been going on. But even though the economy was growing,

and when Nicholas took over, the army did much, much better. They did much worse when he left. So, you know, I think, yeah, the sins of the Russian nation as individuals did cause some of this, you know, but that is not the so-cauls, the sole cause. and there's many schools of thought in the Russian diaspora about why this happened. But to a great extent, you really can't talk about it because talking about the Gulag camps and everything else without talking about the Jews and the Western support of Marxism is forbidden. You can't do that in academia. You can't write a book about that in an academic publisher.

You can't even really talk about the Icebreaker theme. piece is too much, a little bit. I think it's growing in popularity, but for a while you couldn't. So, I don't know who's worthless in his mind here. I'm,

me and you are a lot more Russian than Lenin ever was. Lenin and Trotsky hated everything Russian. Stanley here is more Russian than they were. But, but, but definitely he, I don't know,

He didn't mention it explicitly. But yes, it's just weird. I just finished this paper on the Senate's support for the provisional government, although a conditional support, just as we came across this, such of this last paragraph, where he's looking for you on where does this come about, such that then you would have this internationalist ideology that wants to spread throughout the world through violent revolution.

And, of course, in Stalin's time invasion, And this is part of the reason why people like Hitler and Muslim came into power in the first place. All right. We'll start the next chapter from the end of the war to the death of Stalin. Next episode, I encourage everyone to go over to the show notes and the description in the videos and donate to Dr. Johnson's work. This especially, this last chapter has been very trying on him. so go ahead and go show your support. It's been trying on both of us.

That's right. Dr. Johnson, I'll see you in a couple days. Thank you very much. All right, my friend. See you then. I want to welcome everyone back to part 106 of our reading of 200 years together by Alexander Solzhenyston. Dr. Johnson, how are you doing today? I'm feeling pretty well, despite everything going on with me.

I'm feeling pretty well. I always like to celebrate my father's, today would be his 94th birthday. He was a good man and a good father. Unlike my mother, not a good mother. He was a very good man, and I modeled my parenting after him, which is why I did very well in that department.

It didn't scare me to become a father. I wasn't worried. I'm going to do whatever he did. And I did. And his legacy lives on. He was a very good man. He almost, you know, I'm almost, he almost died in Korea more than once. So there's a chance that I would, I'm not even, shouldn't even be here.

What would the world be like without me? You know, he lost so much, one of the Chinese with their mortars in the Korean War. One after another, he got blown up so badly. And then he lost so much blood. He had a heart attack. And, and they finally rescued. him and they brought him back. They would find him the hospital in Japan.

And otherwise, I would not be here. So, but he barely made it out of Korea as a BAR man. Fighting, fighting communist, of course. Of course. Yeah. And I can't admit.

Yeah. And I know the, the cold there was unbearable for many. You know, he only told me about it. He didn't tell my sisters about it. He mentioned to me maybe five or six times. He used to tell me, you know how you spot a phony? You know, this stolen valor crap.

He said this many years ago. He said, if any guy just starts yakking about killing people to us anybody, you know they're lying. That was his big thing. And it happened quite often, and especially these days with the whole stolen valor thing. All right. We got a new chapter here, chapter 22 from the end of the war to Stalin's death. You ready for this? Yes, sir, I am.

All right, here we go. At the beginning of the 1920s, the authors of a collection of articles titled Russia and the Jews foresaw that all these bright perspectives for the Jews in USSR look so bright only if one supposes that the Bolsheviks would want to protect us, but would they? Can we assume that the people who in the struggle for power betrayed everything from the motherland to come? Communism would remain faithful to us even when it stops benefiting them. However, during so favorable a time to them as the 1920s and 1930s, a great majority of Soviet Jews chose to ignore this somber warning or simply did not hear it. Yet the Jews with their contributions to the Russian Revolution should have expected that one day the inevitable recoil of revolution would hit even them, at least during its ebb.

Let's be clear. There was nothing non-communist. about Joseph Stalin. His agenda was identical to Lenin's and Stalin's and Engels for that matter. As I've said a hundred times before, I'm in books and articles in here. He just had a far more advanced bureaucracy to work with. Don't forget, you know, we just read chapters on Stalin where Jews thrived in most areas. but it's one of my big pet peeves is when people say that you know Stalin was the less a problem that he veered away from from Marxism, Marxism, Leninism. He did no such thing. His agenda was no different than anyone else that preceded him all the way back to to Marx himself.

If you reject the market, you reject private property, then you have to have, by definition, a planned system. There's no other way to do it. So that implies that the party owns everything, controls everything, and that itself implies further totalitarianism. Beyond that, it also implies that enemies have to go. Enemies have to be destroyed wherever they go. So it's a very simple equation.

So, you know, I've had to explain this to people. it's one of the reasons I'm happy I don't have Facebook anymore. They got sick of explaining it to them that somehow Lenin was this impeccable Marxist and Stalin ruined it. This is what we just read up here. And there's no such thing. Absolutely not, under no circumstances.

And, you know, what he says in the future here, Shultz and Eastern in this book, don't forget, he just got finished telling us about how well Jews did under Stalin's rule. The post-war period became the years of deep disappointments and adversity for Soviet Jews. During Stalin's last eight years, Soviet Jewry was tested by persecutions of the cosmopolitans, the loss of positions in science, arts, and press, the crushing of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, E.A.K, with the execution of its leadership, and finally by the doctor's plot.

Well, there was no need for the anti-fascist committee anymore. It wasn't crushed. It was simply disbanded. And as we have read many times in the past, it's one group of Marxist Jews doing this to other Marxist Jews. By the nature of a totalitarian regime, only Stalin himself could initiate the campaign aimed at weakening the Jewish presence and influence in the Soviet system. Only he could make the first move. yet because of the rigidity of Soviet propaganda and Stalin's craftiness, not a single sound could be uttered nor a single step made in the open. We have seen already that Soviet propaganda did not raise any alarm

about the annihilation of Jews in Germany during the war. Indeed, it covered up those things, obviously being afraid of appearing pro-Jewish in the eyes of its own citizens. Well, remember, the camps were taken exclusively by, by Soviet soldiers. And of course, Nuremberg is coming up in the future here. So that's a bit of an exaggeration.

And they controlled, Soviets controlled all the evidence of places like Alshitz and the rest of it. They controlled every bit of evidence there. Hence, they had an interest in covering over their own crimes. The disposition of the Soviet authority, towards Jews could evolve for years without ever really surfacing at the level of official propaganda. The first changes in shuffles and the bureaucracy began quite inconspicuously at the time of growing rapprochement between Stalin and Hitler in 1939. By then Litvenov, a Jewish minister of foreign

affairs was replaced by Molotov and ethnic Russian, and a cleansing of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, NKID, was underway. Simultaneously, Jews were barred from entrance into diplomatic schools and military academies. Still, it took many more years before the disappearance of Jews from the NKID and the sharp decline of their influence in the Ministry of Foreign Trade became apparent. Don't forget, there was no such decree that Stalin wrote down, okay, Jews were going to stay out of this. Many groups were purrs.

Many groups were removed. You know, after a victorious war, Stalin couldn't be touched. you know, there's something about the human brain that when a leader wins a major war like that, especially when they were on the defensive. He because there was no way he was going anywhere. He was, he had a legitimacy, twisted, in a twisted legitimacy for being victorious. So he, but, you know, saying that Jews were harmed as Jews is a totally separate thing from what was. Nathan is talking about now. Because of the intrinsic secrecy of all Soviet inter-party moves, only very few were aware of the presence of the subtle anti-Jewish undercurrents of the Agitprop

apparatus by the end of 1942 that aimed to push out Jews from the major arts centers, such as the Bolshoi Theater, the Moscow Conservatory, and the Moscow Philharmonic, where, according to the note which Alexandrov, head of Agit-Prop presented to the Central Committee in the summer of 1942, quote, everything was almost completely in the hands of non-Russians, and Russians had become an ethnic minority, accompanied by a detailed table to convey particulars. Later, there had been attempts to begin national regulation of cadres from the top down, which essentially meant primarily pushing out Jews from the managerial positions. By and large, Stalin regulated this process by either supporting or checking such efforts,

depending on the circumstances. And not just supports what I've been saying, what so many Russian nationalists have been saying for a long time, that Russia was simply exploited. I mean, the nation of Russia was exploited within the Soviet Union. It was an occupied entity. And so what he's talking about here is that he wants to even things out a little bit, a certain kind of affirmative action,

Jews being just one group, but talking about, you know, in Russia, Russians weren't even in control of the party. As it says here, everything was almost completely in the hands of non-Russian. Stalin, you know, I don't know if we could be going to talk about the Leningrad purge here at some point. But there was far more suspicion aimed at Russians than there were at Jews. but all groups were looked at suspiciously by Stalin, ethnically speaking. And he was, I guess, being told maybe evening things out would be in his interest. I don't know.

The wartime tension and the attitudes towards Jews was also manifested during post-war re-evaluation. In Siberia and Central Asia, wartime Jewish refugees were not welcomed by the local populace. So after the war, they mostly settled in the capitals of Central Asian republics, except for those who moved back, not to their old stettles and towns, but into the larger cities. Well, I mentioned before in Kazakhstan, the Jewish dictatorship that Stalin established there and given great autonomy brought the population to before the war, maybe to a third of what it was, and the Kazakhs became a minority in their own country because of it, destroying the economy keeping food from various groups of people, destroying the nomadic, it was a nomadic society,

Kazakhstan at the time. They couldn't handle that, so they had to destroy it and settle them, which never worked. And so clearly, Jews would not be welcomed in the Central Asian states. The largest returning stream of refugees fled to Ukraine, where they were met with hostility by the local population, especially because of the return of Soviet officials and the owners of desirable residential property. This reaction in the formerly occupied territories was also fueled by Hitler's incendiary propaganda during the Nazi occupation. Khrushchev, the head of Ukraine from 1943 when he was first secretary of the Communist Party and at the same time chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of Ukraine, not only said nothing on this topic in his public

speeches, treating the fate of Jews during the occupation with silence, but he also also upheld the secret instruction throughout Ukraine not to employ Jews in positions of authority. Secret instruction. So what was just whispered? It wasn't written down anywhere. And boy, you know, the Soviets, they love these long, pompous titles. It drives me crazy. You know, chairman of the Council of the People's Commissars of Ukraine, that's short in Soviet life. But whatever incendiary propaganda that, you know, Coke and people like that were. promoting. They had also lived through a decade or more of the opposite. So whether the propaganda actually worked, whether it reached people, the Ukrainian nationalists wanted nothing to do with

Jews seeing them as part of the Marxist occupying power and for a very good reason. But also don't forget that under the SS, Koch in particular, Slavs, also were, the propaganda also was aimed at them. And that's a, that's an important thing to keep in mind, with Jews and Slavs. The infantry, the Vermeck had no problem, loved the Slavs. We're going to organize all these armies and stuff like that, not when the SS got there, at least not in Ukraine. And that's when the anti-Slavic propaganda came in with people like, you know,

Himmler and Koch and even Rosenberg. According to the tale of an old Jewish communist Roushagotus, who survived the entire Nazi occupation under guise of being a poll named Kemoneskaya and was later denied employment by the long-awaited communist because of her Jewishness, Khrushchev stated clearly and with his peculiar frankness, quote, in the past, the Jews committed many sins against Ukrainian people. People hate them for that. We don't need Jews in our Ukraine. It would be better if they didn't return here. they would be better to go to Biro Bidz. This is Ukraine, and we don't want Ukrainian people to, and we don't want Ukrainian people to infer that the return of Soviet authority means the return of Jews, end quote. Yeah, that was a very common sentiment. We've talked about Bidabedon already and why it didn't work. It's such a weird project unless you realize that there was supposed to be mountains of gold underground.

when that didn't pan out, no pun intended. It wasn't successful. But even if there were, I'm not sure how many Jews really wanted to move there. It was such a long, you know, it's, what is it, eight time zones away on the border of China. The very different climate, I don't know. The bit of Bizdon thing is very interesting, but it only makes sense, thanks to the things that I discovered. concerning the gold deposit, but even if it would have proven itself, I don't think the majority of Soviet Jews would have wanted to move there.

In the early September 1945, a Jewish major of the NKVD was brutally beaten in Kiev by two members of the military. He shot both of them dead. This incident caused a large-scale massacre of Jews with five fatalities. There are documented sources of other similar cases. Well, you see, these are two totally different things. NKVD is a party police unit The infantry is the army That's the state Anyone who studies the Soviet Union

Has to realize that there was a big difference between the state And the Communist Party Now of course the party dominated the state But there were moments where the state didn't like that And this is an example here Again, as I mentioned with the Germans. The German

infantry had no problem. They liked the Slavs. The SS came in. Everything changed. But it never became because of, you know, Stalin was considered the victor,

the Voivod, as they used to call him, that he was unmovable. But in the future, there was a deep state, NKVD, you know, and eventually became the KGB, that started asserting itself more powerfully.

There is a distinction there, and this distinction is what matters here. Socialist Tcheschewski Vestnik wrote that the Jewish national feelings, which were exacerbated during the war, overreacted to the numerous manifestations of anti-Semitism into the even more common indifference to anti-Semitism. This motif is so typical almost. as much as anti-Semitism itself, the indifference to anti-Semitism was likely to cause outrage. Yes, preoccupied by their own miseries, people and nations often lose compassion for the troubles of others, and the Jews are not an exception here. A modern author justly notes, quote, I hope that I, as a Jew who found her roots in place in Israel, would not be accused of apostasy

if I point out that in the years of our terrible disasters, the Jewish intellectuals did not raised our voices in defense of the deported nations of Crimea in the Caucasus. After the liberation of Crimea by the Red War. You're talking about Stalin's deportation of the Tartars, who are always very pro-Russian, still are. But it's easy to get lost here. We've got to look at the forest, not just the trees. Every group of people in the Soviet Union had suffered miserably. whether it be from the invasion, from the economy, or Stalin himself.

And after the war, you know, even as far as Jewish opinion was concerned, Stalin was untouchable. He defeated under Hitler. He did most of the legwork. He suffered most of the casualties, despite the fact that it was mostly the wrong men. Huge, you know, whole villages destroyed completely from. from this, you know, especially when the Soviet counterattack. The Germans did not have the equipment or the fuel for any

war of attrition. Didn't have the tanks for it, didn't have the planes for it, which is just, you know, shocking to me when I first read about that, and it's true. So you can't get any of the Jews are just, are inward looking. But I also want to point out that I said this before, And I think I've sent you this paper.

Maybe I haven't that Stalin was the key to the foundation of Israel, not just at home, but also abroad. After the liberation of Crimea by the Red Army in 1943, talk started among circles of the Jewish elite in Moscow about a rebirth of the Crimean project of the 1920s, i.e. about resettling Jews in Crimea. The Soviet government did not discourage these aspirations, hoping that American Jews would be more generous in their donations for the Red Army. It is quite possible that Mikuls and Feffer, heads of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, E.A.K., based on a verbal agreement with Molotov, negotiated with American Zionists about financial support of the project for Jewish relocation to Crimea during their triumphal tour of the USA in the summer of 1943. The idea of a Crimean Jewish Republic was

also backed by Lazovsky, the then-powerful, assistant minister of foreign affairs. You know, I have searched in the Russian language for any reference to Khazaria or New Khazaria, and at this era during this point, and I can't find it. It may have simply been in the back of their minds, but Crimea, of course, ethnically made a hell of a lot more sense than the border with China in the far east. and there was another attempt to do the same before the Russo-Ukrainian War of 2022, about which I have an excellent book.

I do mention this. New Qazardia was actually being built. It was destroyed. And now it seems that they're moving to Dubai. and that's where very wealthy Jews are going because Israel was flattened by the Iranians. But at the time, the Tartars had been removed, most of them, so maybe the Jews can have their own state there, yes, and it was something that was taken very seriously. The E.A.K had yet another project for a Jewish Republic to establish it in the place of the former Volga, German, autonomous Soviet socialist Republic, whereas we have seen in previous chapters, Jewish settlements were established in the wake

of the exile of the Germans. Esther Marquish, widow of E.A.K. member Peretz Markish, confirms that he presented a letter concerning transferring the former German Republic to the Jews. In the Politburo, Molotov, Kaganov, and Viroslov were the most positively disposed to the EAK. And according to rumors, some members of the Politburo were inclined to support this Crimean idea. idea. On February 15th, 1944, Stalin was forwarded a memorandum about the plan, which was signed by Mikuls, P. Feffer and Fishtin, according to P. Sudapladov, although the decision to expel the Tartars from Crimea was done what had been made by Stalin earlier, the order to carry it out reached Beria on February 14th. So the memorandum was quite timely.

You know, Stalin had no, he did this all the time. He removed all the Koreans from Central Asia. Not sure if they were doing in Central Asia, but the removal of populations transfer was something that he did constantly. And it never worked out. A lot of people died. And he didn't care. But there was a sense that, okay, get rid of the Tartars who were way too pro-Russian. They still are to this day and settle the Jews.

It wasn't under the New Qazadea banner, but it was, as I said before, just a few years ago. That was the high point of Jewish hopes. G.V. Costorenko, a researcher of this period, writes, the leaders of the E.A.K. plunged into euphoria. They imagined, especially after Michels and Fefer's trip to the West, that with the necessary pressure, they could influence and year their government's policy in the interest of the Soviet Jews, just like the American Jewish elite does it. But Stalin did not approve the Crimean project. He did not appeal to him because of the strategic importance of the Crimea. It did not appeal to him because of the strategic importance

of the Crimea. The Soviet leaders expected a war with America, and probably that thought that in such the case, the entire Jewish population in Crimea would sympathize with the enemy. It is reported that at the beginning of the 1950s, some Jews were arrested and told by the MGB investigators, the predecessor to the KGB, you are not going to stand against America, are you? So you are our enemies. Khrushchev shared those thoughts, and 10 years later, he stated to a delegation of the Canadian Communist Party that was expressing particular interest in the Jewish question in the U.S. USSR, Crimea should not be a center of Jewish colonization because in case of war, it will become

the enemy's bridgehead. Indeed, the petitions about Jewish settlement in Crimea were very soon used as proof of the state treason on the part of the members of the E.A.K. There was no way that they didn't say this tongue in cheek. I mean, the U.S. was all over the Soviet Union. After the war, all their debts were canceled. They rebuilt the West, rebuild the country, especially, really the U.S. was all that was left of the West. The Marshall Plan for everybody else. Well, the Soviets didn't accept it because they would have to turn over their books, which is why they wanted to. It was offered to them, their alleged enemy.

But they said no. We're not going to turn over our books. So, you know, they're going to realize that we're fudging all these numbers. but instead it was far better. They got massive amounts of investment, just like they had built the workers' paradise in the 20s. It was rebuilt. Anthony Sutton has detailed analysis of this after the war.

You know, the debts that had been incurred during the war were monstrous. And all of that was canceled. And I can't imagine and the Soviet support of Israel on the one hand and the fact that Stalin had defeated Hitler on the other, why would they be so paranoid about the Jews? Were they expecting an invasion? They're not going to invade and destroy their very own capital.

So this doesn't make any sense. I think this is a lot of psychological warfare here. By the way, you mentioned Anthony Sutton often, especially that book. What's your take on his book, Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler? I was just thinking about that. I think about that on a regular basis. I've read, I've read it.

I've read everything he's written. It's a very different type of book. Let me put it to you this way. The multi-volume work on the West building the Soviet Union was in great painstaking detail. Your eyes glaze over, going down to the receipts itemized. that's not the case with the rise of Hitler thing it's far more vague

it's far more indirect I don't know if he was doing it just to kind of balance the scales it's almost like another guy wrote it I love the guy he has changed history with that multi-volume work on the U.S.

How could the U.S. be anti-commun if they're building it that means the entire history, the 20th century has to be rewritten. And then the Hitler thing being very, very different. The detail is gone. Everything seems to be very indirect. When I was at the Barnes Review, we ran at least one review of it. I didn't write it, but it had to go through me. And more than one reader had responded saying that this is a very different Anthony Sutton.

I don't know if he was under pressure to do it. But there's many authors on our side. Kerry Bolton, I believe is his name, who was completely destroyed Anthony Sutton's book, that particular book. But no one can touch the other ones, the Western investment in the Soviet Union, because they were so detailed.

There's no way to, how do you argue with it? You know, that's why massive, number of volumes because he wrote more volumes later on, but only been one relatively small volume on Hitler and Wall Street. It's too vague and indirect. It's not like, it's like two different authors. And it's been refuted now, I think Kerry Bolton, oh, Kerry Bolton, is that what I said? It's Kerry Bolton.

Yeah. Is, again, one of my favorite authors just for that. And I've gone to him for that before to make. to make sure I'm on the right track. And yeah, he tears it apart. And he says the same thing I do. And if you go to Beandex and look up Kerry Bolton against that book, you'll find very powerful, very lengthy articles, actually,

far more detailed than what I could say here. But it's hard. It was hard to, you know, there's no question. about the U.S. was not anti-communists, at least not the regime, not the ruling class. Absolutely was not. That doesn't make any sense. There was never, it was always free trade.

So many Soviet scientists were educated at MIT and Harvard. They went back to the Soviet Union and built. So, but Wall Street issue, there's so many holes in his argument. and it's not nearly as length, it's not even close, it's a fraction of what he wrote on, on the investment in the USSR.

And I always kind of wonder why he wrote that and wrote it the way he did. I've read it, I read it many times, and I was surprised, and Kerry Bolton, I think, added the detail that we needed, and he is an excellent refutation of that.

So I just needed to, you know, with him, I wanted to make sure I was on the right track, I read him before on other things. And yeah, it's always worse than I think. And it's kind of shocking, actually. It harms his reputation. But thank God he's best known for his massive number of volumes on, because he has a separate book on the weapons,

American weapons going to the Soviet Union, the weapons technology. I forget the title. Something like the betrayal or... Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, betrayal, the enemy. Was it national suicide, military aids for the Soviet Union? That's exactly it. That's exactly it.

And that book goes, you know, way beyond here we're talking about here. Advanced computer technologies being sent there all throughout, you know, the 60s and beyond. So that's just another volume. so this is, you know, far more than the three-volume work. Never again, really. I don't know if he touched that, the German topic ever again. But it is, I guess maybe some of the banking things are the closest he comes, but banking connections, but, you know, those were all severed.

And it was Wall Street that screamed for war almost immediately. We're not interested in, you know, there were, there was, there were sanctions on Germany, but never on the USSR. So, my God, there were sanctions on Franco after the war, but not on the Soviet Union, never on the Soviet Union, except where the Jews were concerned much later. So, yes, I think about that quite often. I mentioned Bolton in my book on the USSR, because this is a big part of it. and I've cited him many, many times in the past, but it's like two different people.

By the end of World War II, the authorities again revived the idea of Jewish resettlement and bureau bids on particularly Ukrainian Jews. From 1946 to 1947, several organized echelons and a number of independent families were sent there, totaling up to 5,000 to 6,000 persons. However, quite a few returned disillusioned. This relocation movement withered by 1940. Later, with the general turn of Stalin's politics, arrests among the few Biroidizian Jews Jewish activists started. They were accused of artificial inculcation of Jewish culture into the non-Jewish population and, of course, espionage, and of having planned Biro Bidzen's secession in order to ally with Japan.

This was a de facto end of the history of Jewish colonization in Biro Bidzen. At the end of the 1920s, there were planned. to resettle 60,000 Jews there by the end of the first five-year planning period. By 1959, there were only 14,000 Jews in Bureau Bids, and less than 9% of the population of the region. Generally speaking, yeah, there may have been a fewer arrests. They were using Hebrew or whatever rather than Yiddish, but it was something that was continuously promoted.

But the location alone, not that it was going to be, it's a port, Japan, But there weren't enough people there to matter. They were on the Chinese border. You know, so most of the people who went there realized that, man, the lodgings, the weather, this is southern Siberia. This is a very, very difficult place for them, at least, to live. You did have some Russians there. You did have some native peoples there.

They made themselves very unpopular immediately. they weren't going to work but certainly claiming that it was because they were going to be an ally of Japan in some way again that's more propaganda that wouldn't have mattered they were

quite a little unless I don't know what Eric who's talking about here because it is on the border of Manchuria we're very close to it I'm not entirely sure that they would support Japan when you know But that's a lot of propaganda.

That was not really the issue. Most of the people who went after the war returned. And there's, I think right now, there is a functioning synagogue there. I just came across an article about it as a rabbi there. Even today, they're still trying to make it work somehow. But it's just maybe, at its height, maybe it was 10% of the population. or Jews, but it was such a bizarre project absolutely in the middle of, no, you can't get in more in the middle of nowhere than that. And that was way beyond what the Jews were capable of

at any point in their history. However, in Ukraine, the situation had markedly changed in favor of Jews. The government was engaged in the fierce struggle with Bandera separatist fighters and no longer catered to the national feelings of Ukrainians. At the end of 1946, the Communist Party started a covert campaign against anti-Semitism, gradually conditioning the population to the presence of Jews among authorities in different spheres of the national economy. At the same time, in the beginning of 1947, Kaganovich took over for Khrushchev as the official leader of the Ukrainian Communist Party.

The Jews were promoted in the party as well, of which a particular example was the appointment of a Jew, the secretary of Jidomir Opcom. Well, what is it? Was it, was it a persecution of Jews or, or a campaign against anti-Semitism? Yeah, were he saying this in the same chapter? This is, this, this paragraph reverses everything that he's said already. Now, I suppose when the nationalist movement rose, now I do have another book, which I highly recommend,

simply called Ukrainian nationalism, which you can find on, you know, which is actually quite sympathetic from my young. I take, you know, Gogol's point of view. I do believe that most of Ukraine should be independent, but in a close relation with Russia, kind of like Belarus is. That was Nikolai Gogol's point of view. And that's where I kind of got it from. But I loathe people trying to connect Bandera, whose works I've read, although it's been quite

a while, to the government in Ukraine now. they're not even close. Bender did not trust the West. He certainly didn't trust the Americans. He knew that the Americans at the West were assisting the Soviet Union the entire time, that were not pro-American at all. And as I've always said, you know, every ethnic group deserves a state of its own if it so wants. But Benderra was in a very difficult position.

and I suppose he had been around for a while and there were many others Milnick and many others were I go in much greater detail in my book on Ukrainian nationalism on this topic but given the fact that Stalin was immovable at this point

his fate was sealed but once he you know and his numbers are iffy I'm not sure no one really knows there's some estimates but that was just enough to get the communist to

to need to recruit the Jews now. So either, you know, I can't, I can't tell if there were, Soviets were anti-Semitic or they were, they were fighting in favor of, of, um, destroying anti-Semitism.

Right in the same paragraph. Which, you know, which is it? Um, Banderas forters weren't large enough to cause that much of a problem. You know, you would think, you know, if the, the West was anti-communists, they would get some aid. No way. No way they were condemned by the West. They had no chance and they knew it. In the past, they had some fighters trained in Germany.

Those years were over. So many of them ended up in the gulag. But you can't say that Jews were being removed from everything. And then now saying that there's this war. against anti-Semitism. We're talking about roughly the same period of time. So, but it would take a force like that, anything like that, that would get the Communist Party to realize that, okay, we have to go to our base. We all know what that base is. You know, Bandera, when you read him, he essentially was a national socialist. You know, he writes what most nationalists would say.

No different than any Russian nationalist. Norwegian nationalists, you know, just you change the, you know, he makes the same argument. You know, he was a guild socialist and his economic theory, so to speak. But, and God, I just wince, the worst part of this war in Ukraine is people talking about it in the media. And the Russians, yes, of course, I support their side. But Bandera had nothing to do with any of the groups. fighting the Russians in Ukraine. He would have, he would have, he would have, he would have rejected all of them.

Despite them using his, his, his, his picture, um, Benderra was more or less a national socialist of a kind and, uh, did not trust anything Western, uh, as well as, as the, um, I didn't trust anything, anything Soviet. And he also did make a distinction between Russian and Soviet, too. as did Milnick. So it's been a while since I've read Bandera. He didn't write very much, but what he did write is very interesting. And, of course, his movement was quite.

He had no chance. He had zero chance. And he was well aware that the Jews were the main support of the Communist Party, especially in Ukraine. And now all of a sudden there's a shift in the mentality. I'm not to forget, the laws that London laid down for the execution of anti-Somites, they were never repealed. They weren't repealed right up until Gorbachev.

This remained consistently. Jews saw Stalin as a savior against Hitler, regardless of anything else. So this is, you know, it's confusing, but you can't say both in the same paragraph. No, there was no, as I said, there was no. order to destroy Jews in the USSR after the war. No such thing. And this paragraph proves it. Going to do this last paragraph and then after this paragraph it changes to the founding of Israel. So that would be a good cutoff point. However, the attitudes of many Jews towards the government and its new policies were justifiably cautious. Soon after the end of the war,

when the former Polish citizens began returning to Poland, many non-Polish Jews hastily seized this opportunity and relocated there. What happened after that in Poland is yet another story. A great over-representation of Jews occurred in the post-war puppet Polish government among managerial elites and in the Polish KGB, which would again result in miserable consequences for the Jews of Poland. After the war, other countries of Eastern Europe saw similar conflicts. Quote, the Jews had played a huge role in economic life in all of those countries, and though they lost their possessions under Hitler after the war when the restitution laws were introduced, they affected very large numbers of new owners. Upon their return, Jews demanded the restoration of their property and enterprises that were not nationalized by communists, and this created a new wave of hostility towards them.

I guess the only people who were allowed to own property were the Jews of Eastern Europe. Well, that would change, you know, pretty quickly, but it didn't matter. I noticed that, like in Hungary, in 56, the anti-communists and the anti-Stalinists and the pro-Stalinists were equally many Jews within both. But much of the productive capital, of course, was taken to the USSR to rebuild. these are these are the western countries that especially Poland that this war was started over in 39 but the West had no problem giving it to the USSR in fact Stalin was very nervous about taking Poland and he was very careful this is why he didn't you know begin collectivization quite or full nationalization right away not a problem um you know it's like he got a pass for

everything he did. But pretty soon, though, that this would be the case. There would be full nationalization. It would be more like the Soviet Union. Not the case in Yugoslavia. Very different story there. Not that that's relevant, but that's the only place where it was a little different and a little bit more humane, I would say.

But, yeah, Jews ran all of this. They ran the parties prior to the war, during the war, and after the war. and so when Hitler was defeated, they came back. You know, I winced when you said many non-Polish Jews hastily seized the opportunity and relocated there. And then, of course, the next few sentences, they were hated. Of course they were. Burmont was the head of the secret police in Poland, and it was particularly vicious. So it just the West couldn't have been more pro-Soviet, pro-Stalin, pro-Khrushchev.

They couldn't have been. And people tell me, well, what about Korea and Vietnam? Well, an answer to that is quite simple. The U.S. was worried about any empire growing way too large, especially after 1949, when Stalin, sorry, when China fell because U.S. abandoned Chankajek. deliberately allowing him to fall. But any empire growing as large as a Soviet, it didn't matter what their ideology was,

would be a threat to the U.S. U.S. did worry about being cut out of economic deals. You know, the rubble being replacing the dollar, stuff like that. And so that's why the fighting took place, it was not ideological at all. as the wars as Korea and Vietnam were going on there was advanced

weapons trading going straight to the to the USSR that went straight to Moscow and right down to Vietnam and right to Hanoi which is part of the reason why they

South Vietnam was very brave army lost and of course the US also abandoned the ARVN2 but none of that, none of those wars cancel out the fact that the capital, including the weapon system at this point, at least their foundations, were Western-based. And there were massive investment within the Soviet Union. So much so, as I've said before, that Stalin was worried about the Soviets losing their independence. So there was all these laws

The Americans, Westerners couldn't control They controlled maybe 45%, 10% whatever it is. So it's shocking. It should be shocking to anybody, but it isn't. But Solon takes all of Eastern Europe and takes Poland

the country that the war allegedly started over. No problem. No sanctions, nothing. Franco told a different story. Sanctions all over the place. It's just, as I keep saying, the 20th century history, and I taught this class at several universities, and I got into a lot of trouble because of it, the official history of the 20th century is nonsense. Well, the official history of everything is nonsense, but the 20th century is just one very obnoxious example. All right.

Be back in a couple days to continue with this chapter, talking about the founding of Israel. I encourage everybody go over to the show notes and go over to the description of the videos, donate to Dr. Johnson's work. We were just talking about Ukraine in this episode, and his new book on Ukraine is link there. It's another way you can support him. So thank you, Dr. Johnson, as always, and talk to you in a couple days. All right, my friend. I'm glad you're healthy again. Thank you.

All right, ma'am. I want to welcome everyone back to our reading of 200 years. together by Alexander Solzhenyson. This is episode 107. We're almost at 109. Dr. Johnson, how are you doing today? All right. Yeah, I needed to laugh today. You know, unfortunately, my boy, Marcel, I was taking a turn for the worst. I don't know how long he's going to be here. It's rough. My wife saw the inside of his mouth and just was in tears. And I can't see. I'd never been able to, but he's not eating now, or he's eating and he's not getting weight. So this has been what I feared for a long time.

It probably was cancer, a slow-moving cancer. But Marcel and Stanley grew up together. Marcel used to be the head of security for the BLM, but it was a black feline lives matter. But he left them when I, you know, I adopted him as a infant. I mean, he was tiny. But he's looking rough and he's not in any obvious pain, but this is not something that I was looking forward to these days. You know, so anything to make me laugh would be great.

It was probably the wrong book for that, I think. Yeah. Well, I've been there, man. Been there many times. So, yeah. All righty. We are going to start talking about the Soviet Union and Zionism today. the founding of Israel, so let's get into it.

Meanwhile, during these very years, the biggest event in world Jewish history was happening. The state of Israel was coming into existence. In 1946, 1947, when the Zionists were at odds with Britain, Stalin, perhaps out of anti-British calculation or opportunistically hoping to get a foothold there, took the side of the former. During all of 1947, Stalin, acting through Grimico in the UN, actively supported the idea of the creation of an independent Jewish state in Palestine and supplied the Zionists with a critical supply of Cheshos-Lavac-made weapons. In May 1948, only two days after the Israeli Declaration

of Nationhood, the USSR officially recognized that country and condemned the hostile actions and condemn the hostile actions of Arabs. I've cited this before. It's not something that gets talked about very much. And that's the reason why I wrote the paper that it's in the show notes. There's quite a bit of scholarly literature on it, but not popular. Not popular literature at all. The Soviets created the state of Israel.

and the U.S., when they put their arms embargo on the area, just meant that it was just the Arabs because Solomon was supplying the Jews. And Guamiko, as I think I've mentioned many times before, made this impassioned speech at the UN about Jewish suffering, how they need this state here. And I think right after that speech, Arabs burned down the Communist Party headquarters in Damascus, Syria, and most of them were members of the party.

They were completely abandoned. And it was said not just by him, but by many others, in both the Soviet and the Jewish side, that the Arabs were just too backwards for Marxism. There's two superstitious. There's two dedicated to the religion for Marxism. Jews are obviously natural allies. They created us, essentially. And it's interesting to read about the back and forth.

And then eventually Truman came along. It wasn't the case in the U.S. there were plenty of people Forrestall, for example James Forrestall who was opposed to Zion. The issue either was a one state where both Arabs and Jews would live or partition. Partition is what the Zionists wanted

and that's obviously what happened. But there was never any Palestinian state. So this all came from the USSR. And that relationship didn't end until Israel supported American actions during the Korean War. Then it stopped. And then by then they had shifted over. So just a couple of years.

But that two years was absolutely critical to Israel's existence. you know, they had no problem. The Ergun and Stern Gang were slaughtering people all over the place. Well, you know, for Stalin, that's like a Tuesday. So this was absolutely, Soviet support was absolutely essential for the founding of Israel. They were the first the state to recognize them. And Stalin was one of the most significant figures in early Israeli history right up until the 70s. However, Stalin miscalculated to what extent this support would reinvigorate the national spirit of Soviet Jews.

Some of them implored the E.A.K. to organize a fundraiser for the Israeli military, others wished to enlist as volunteers, while still others wanted to form a special Jewish military division. Amid the burgeoning enthusiasm, Golda Mier arrived to Moscow in September in 1948 as the first ambassador of Israel and was met with unprecedented joy in Moscow's synagogues, and by Moscow's Jewish population in general. Immediately, as the national spirit of Soviet Jews rose and grew tremendously because of the catastrophe, many of them began applying for relocation to Israel. Apparently, Stalin had expected that, yet it turned out that many of his citizens wished to run away en masse into, by all accounts, the pro-Western state of Israel. There, the influence and prestige of the United States grew, while the USSR was at the same time losing support of Arab countries. Nevertheless, the cooling of relations with Israel was mutual.

Israel more and more often turned towards American Jewry, which became its main support. Well, American Jewelry is just another word for American government. Obviously, the Soviet Union was in a far inferior position to finance anything after the war. The U.S. was totally untouched by it. They essentially found the better deal, and they went with it. it took a little while before the Zionists were able to fully infiltrate the executive branch. And some people might be surprised by the opposition in Truman's administration to the creation of the state of Israel in the sense that it would alienate the Arabs. It would give the Arabs over to the Soviets and that oil supplies might be interrupted.

to the West. So that was essentially, there aren't a Forrestall's argument, for example. And he was threatened into silence. But James Forrestall, among others, made those arguments. This was a very bad idea. And they said that group of people in the State Department said the same things we say today, that we're going to end up being dragged into all of these wars over there if we end up supporting this entity.

So how it ended up, as we all know, the Jews got the better deal with the U.S., took over the American foreign policy establishment, and the Soviets financed Egypt, Syria, Iraq, etc. Probably because he was frightened by such a schism in the Jewish national feelings. Stalin drastically changed policies regarding Jews from the end of 1948 and for the rest of his remaining years. He began acting in his typical style, quiet. but with determination, he stuck to the core, but with only tiny movements visible on the surface. Nevertheless, while the visible tiny ripples hardly matter, Jewish leaders had many reasons to be concerned, as they felt the fear hanging in the air. The then editor of the Polish Jewish newspaper Fulchstim, Gersh Smollier, recalled the panic that seized Soviet communist Jews after the war.

Emmanuel Kazakovich and other Jewish writers were distressed. Smallier had seen on Aaronberg's table a mountain of letters, literally scream of pain about anti-Jewish attitudes throughout the country. So we're talking about right at the end of the war the next year or so. And these anti-Jewish attitudes, I guarantee you, centered around the fact that Jews dominated the political part of the army, as we've already talked about, the political commissars, but were not necessarily in the line of fire.

That was for the Guiam. And that was proven by the Leningrad affair, which occurred a few years later. Again, they have no conception of consequences. That is the case. That's true. That's what happened. But they had no reason to feel distressed

in general. I think they're talking about popular anti-Semitism, not official anti-Semitism. But remember, all the anti-Semitic laws or the anti-Semitic laws from Lennon were always on the books, were never repealed, and Lennon enforced them like anybody else. Yet Aaron Berg knew his job very well and carried it out. As became known much later, it was exactly then that the pre-publication copy of the black book, compiled by I. Aeronberg and B. Grossman, which described the mass killings and suffering of the Soviet Jews during the Soviet-German war, was destroyed. In addition, on September 21, 1948, as a counterbalance to Golda Mayer's triumphal return, Pravda published a large article commissioned by Ehrenberg, which stated

that the Jews are not a nation at all and that they are doomed to assimilate. This article created dismay not only among Soviet Jews, but also in America. With the start of the Cold War, the discrimination against the Jews in the Soviet Union became one of the main anti-Soviet Trump cards of the West, as was the inclination in the West towards various ethnic separatist movements in the USSR, a sympathy that had never previously gained support among Soviet Jews. Well, that came a little bit later. You remember this isn't Solzhenitsyn. He's quoting someone else. At this, point, Stalin was a firm Zionist. It was a way to challenge the British. And again, he truly believed the arborist couldn't become Marxists, so let them do whatever they want. It's ungovernable

anyway. But again, as we all know, that didn't last long. But as far as the West is concerned, that didn't really develop until the 1970s. However, the E.A.K, which had been created, to address wartime issues, continued gaining influence. By that time, it listed approximately 70 members, had its own administrative apparatus, a newspaper, and a publishing house. It functioned as a kind of spiritual and physical agent of all Soviet Jews before the CK, Central Committee of the VKPD, all Russian Communist Party of Bolsheviks, as well as before the West.

EAK executives were allowed to do and to have a lot, a decent south, and opportunity to publish and collect royalties abroad, to receive and to redistribute gifts from abroad, and finally to travel abroad. E.A.K became the crystallization center of an initially elitist in upper echelon and then of a broadly growing Jewish national movement, a burgeoning symbol of Jewish national autonomy. For Stalin, the E.A.K became a problem, which had to be dealt with. Yeah, at some point, but immediately after the war, it wasn't. this was a very pro-Soviet group of Jews. I mean, after all, remember the context.

Solent just defeated Hitler. He did most of the work in that regard. So, you know, their loyalty to him was extraordinary. But is referring to the anti-fascist committee, which will eventually be eliminated. But it will be eliminated because really there was no need for it anymore. You know, Germany and Italy were there. their fascist governments were gone. It just wasn't necessary.

So, and of course, Jews were very well treated and were heavily in the bureaucracy and all over the place, especially in the mid-levels. And as this paragraph said, treated extremely well, and which is a cause for popular anti-Semitism, even within the Communist Party. He started with the most important figure, the head of the Soviet Information Bureau, Sov-in-form Bureau, Lazovsky, who, according to Feffer, who was vice-chairman of E.A.K. Since July 1945, was the spiritual leader of the E.A.K.

knew all about its activities and was its head for all practical purposes. In the summer of 1946, a special auditing commission from Agitprop of the C.K. inspected Sov-in-form Bureau and found that the apparatus is polluted. There is an intolerant.

concentration of Jews. Lazzoski was ejected from his post of assistant minister of foreign affairs, just as Litvanov and Myski had been, and in the summer of 1947, he also lost his post as head of the Sovind Foreign Bureau. Yeah, that sounds bad, but this is precisely the time when Stalin was fully supporting the creation of Israel and challenging the West in this regard at the U.S. win. If you haven't read it yet, Gromiko's speech there is, every speech from an Israeli leader is just essentially variations on that one. That created it and then alienated the Arabs forever. The Arabs never quite trusted the communists or Soviet communists after that. But Zionism, maybe this could be a way to deal with the Jewish problem. Yes, maybe Stalin did think.

that for a while. After that, the fate of the E.A.K. was sealed. In September of 1946, the auditing commission from the Central Committee concluded that the E.A.K, instead of leading a rigorous, offensive ideological war against the Western and above all Zionist propaganda, supports the position of bourgeois Zionists and the Bund, and in reality, it fights for the reactionary idea of a United Jewish nation. In 1947, the Central Committee stated, that the work among the Jewish population of the Soviet Union is not a responsibility of the E.A.K. The E.K.'s job was to focus on the decisive struggle against aggression by international reactionaries and their Zionist agents.

So you clearly see no matter how powerful Stalin was and his role as, you know, the victor over fascism, you still had factions saying different things. The policy goes one way, the rhetoric goes another way. However, these events coincided with the pro-Israel stance of the USSR and the E.A.K. was not dissolved. On the other hand, E.A.K. Chairman Mekels, who was the informal leader of Soviet Jewry, had to shed his illusions about the possibility of influencing the Kremlin's national policy via influencing the dictator's relatives. Here, the suspicion fell mostly on Stalin's son, son-in-law, Gregory Morozov. However, the most active help to the E.A.K. was provided by Molotov's wife,

P.S. Gem Shina, who was arrested in the beginning of 1949 and Voroshilov's wife, a Katerina Davidovna, Golda Gorman, a fanatic Bolshevik, who had been expelled from the synagogue in her youth. Abakumov reported that Mikuls was suspected of gathering private information about the leader. Overall, according to the MGB, he demonstrated excessive interest in the private life at the head of the Soviet government, while leaders of the E.A.K. gathered material about the private life of Joseph Stalin and his family at the behest of U.S. intelligence. However, Stalin could not risk an open trial of the tremendously influential Mikuls, So Mikos was murdered in January 1948 under the guise of an accident. Soviet Jewry was shocked and terrified by the demise of their spiritual leader.

Just remember, Stalin's children married Jews and their children married Jews. So Jews were all over the place. And this is why this group was so interested in Stalin's private, I guess it's considered Stalin's private life, how much power they had over his, decision making is hard to discern, but this is what they're talking about. But even, you know, like Madozov, well, he's married to a, or Vorozhlov, married to a Jew. So even the non-Jewish ones have a Jewish director. And Golda Gorman is a whole different matter entirely. And she was

expelled from the synagogue not so much for Marxism, but for her behavior. She was a half lunatic. She was a, you know, very violent person. And so even the non-Jewish members, high and breaking members of the party had Jews very, very close to them at all times. V.A.K. was gradually dismantled after that. By the end of 1948, its premises were locked up. All documents were taken to Lubyanka,

and its newspaper and the publishing house were closed. Pfefer and Zuskin, the key E.A.K figures, were secretly arrested soon afterwards, and these arrests were denied for a long time. In January 1949, Lozowski was arrested, followed by the arrests of a number of other notable members of the E.A.K. in February, they were intensively interrogated during 1949, but in 1950, the investigation stalled. All this coincided in accord with Stalin's understanding of balance with the annihilation of the Russian nationalist tendencies and the leadership of the Leningrad government, the so-called anti-party group of Kuznetsov, Rodionov, Popkov, but those developments, their repression and the significance of those events were largely overlooked by historians, even though about 2,000 party functionaries were arrested and subsequently executed in 1950 in connection with the Leningrad affair. I knew he was going to mention this at some point.

I also have the paper on that. This was a group of men. They essentially fought the Germans within Leningrad. That siege lasted a very long time. And they were extremely popular when it was over. But they also started to question, you know, why is Russia being exploited like this? you know, why the Jews is so powerful here. And it was very quiet.

I mean, most Westerns don't know about this. The Leningrad affair was to say that Russian nationalism will be absolutely never tolerated or chauvinism, as they used to say, will not be tolerated. We can't have a Russian party, quote unquote, in the USSR, which is why, you know, when people say Soviet Russia, You got to laugh at them. So Stalin pinned metal after metal on them in 1945, 44, 45. Two years later, they were executed because they asked all the wrong questions. I have a paper on that on Patreon, but I could send that to you today even as well. It's very interesting.

In January 1948, Stalin ordered Jews to be pushed out of Soviet culture. In his usual, subtle and devious manner, the order came through a prominent editorial in Pravda, seemingly dealing with a petty issue, about one anti-party group of theatrical critics. A more assertive article in Kultura and Jinsh followed on the next day. The key point was the decoding of Russian and of Russian the pen, Russian, Russian, the pen names of Jewish celebrities. In the USSR, many Jews camouflaged their Jewish origins with such artifice so that it is impossible to figure out their real names, explains the editor of a modern Jewish journal. This article in Provda had a long but obscure prehistory.

In 1946, reports of the Central Committee, it was already noted that out of 28 highly publicized theatrical critics, only six are Russians. It implied the majority of the rest were Jews. Smelling trouble, but still supposing themselves to be vested with the highest trust of the party, some theatrical critics confident of victory openly confronted Faddeev in November 1946. Faddeev was the all-powerful head of the Union of Soviet writers and Stalin's favorite, and so they suffered a defeat. Then the case stalled for a long time and only resurfaced in 1949. You know, making reference to Soviet culture is odd

because the system was purely ideological and so artificial. You know, we talked about socialist realism in painting and propaganda and everything else. I mean, everything was meant to be propaganda. Propaganda was how the Soviet artist was to live. That was his purpose. No matter what else he wanted. to do. But, you know, theater, east and west has been a Jewish concern. It wasn't always that way. But yes, it's true that there was, you know, they dominated the critical side of things.

And, but, you know, Salon's concern, you know, he's executing Russians and, but not, he's not executing Jews. he's simply eliminating their organizations and then sending them or some of them to Israel with a lot of money and a lot of weapons. So clearly, and certainly Stalin was more than aware of all the Jews who changed their names. It was not impossible to figure out their real names because so many of our people in the West were already doing that.

You know, I mean, I don't know how we lived before the Internet. I guess we didn't know anything. But you had plenty of books published even in the early days of the Revolution who exposed the names of the fake names of the Jews. So Stalin was well aware of that, so that couldn't have been a real reason. The campaign rolled on through the newspapers and party meetings. G. Aronson, researching Jewish life in Stalin's era, writes, The goal of this campaign was to displaced Jewish intellectuals from all niches

of Soviet life. Informers were gloatingly revealing their pen names. It turned out that E. Kolodov is actually Meyerovich. Jacques-Jovlev is Coltsman. Mecklenov is Milman. Jasny is Finkelstein. Vicarov is Shloshvsky. Zvetov is Scheidman and so on.

Literatunayayya Gazeta worked diligently on these discourses. They were getting doxed. They were getting doxed. There were plenty of people who did use their regular Jewish sounding names, not all of them. But when they collected in one area, to a great extent such as they absolutely dominated it, then it became clear we have to do something about that as far as perception goes. And the Soviets were always very concerned with their image abroad. and that's exactly what this was about.

It was the only time that the Western world ever cared about the crimes of Stalin and the USSR. It wouldn't affect the Jews. Undeniably, Stalin hit the worst offending spot, the one that highly annoyed the public. However, Stalin was not so simple as it just blurt out the Jews. From the first push at the group of theatrical critics floated, a broad and sustained campaign against the cosmopolitans. With their Soviet inertial dimwittedness, they overused this innocent term and spoiled it. Without exception, all cosmopolitians under attack were Jews. They were being discovered everywhere. Because all of them were loyal Soviet citizens

never suspected of anything anti-Soviet, they survived the great purges of Yeshov and Yagoda. Some were very experienced and influential people, sometimes eminent, in their fields of expertise. The exposure of cosmopolitans then turned into a ridiculous, even idiotic glorification of Russian primacy in all and every area of science,

technology, and culture. Well, let's back up here. It's not Russian. Russian culture is founded on the church and on the land. You know, again, it's a matter of culture

that really didn't exist. It was so artificial or driven underground. You know, the purges of Yuzov and Yergoa, well, they were both Jews. And, you know, cosmopolitan could make reference to anyone who sought an accord with outside powers. People say that, you know, socialism in one country was his nationalist stance, and there's nothing of the kind. but there were people who wanted to reach out to Yugoslavia, believe it or not, which could death sentence in USSR. And why? Because Petito actually wanted to create a worker-controlled industry.

It's the only fully communist country that wasn't a blatant, sick tyranny. I mean, it was to a great extent. but Stalin could not handle this because Marxism and especially Leninism had nothing to do with workers, had nothing to do with workers' control and had to do with the domination of a specific group of people. But remember, the whole point of the Soviet Union was to act as a base for the revolution to take over the rest of the planet.

And there's something that Stalin talked about all the time. His writings on this subject, they're not secret. They're in English for free all over the Internet. So you make a reference to a Russian culture under Stalin. What the hell is that? Most of the church have been destroyed. Collectivization was again being remade. And so many of the people who welcomed the Germans in 1941 were now in the gulags. What they consider Russian is a completely artificial, I dare say, cosmopolitan concept that had no basis in reality. Yet the cosmopolitans usually were not being arrested, but instead were publicly humiliated, fired from publishing houses, ideological and cultural organizations, from Tass, from Glovlet,

from literature schools, theaters, orchestras. Some were expelled from the party and the publication of their works were often. and discouraged. Well, you know, who was being arrested, a Russian Orthodox clergy. They were being shot all over the place, or being sent to the gulag all over the place. You know, the big thing, you know, Solomon Swartz,

we talked about him before, was he could talk to the suffering of the Jews, refusing to talk about the Jewish role at this very time and earlier and then later of the total destruction, almost the total destruction, of the Russian Orthodox Church and any Russian Orthodox Church

and any true Russian nationalist of any type whatsoever in the worst possible way. These were not awful punishments. And oftentimes it was a group of Jews within the party that was actually carrying this out. This has happened many times since we started here. And the lists of letters that we talked about of all of the Jews who dominate all these areas.

There was a popular anti-Semitism for the reasons that I mentioned. And that's not something that Solomon wanted to get involved in. You know, he, again, very worried about how he was perceived, despite the fact that he had won the war and was, you know, no one could challenge him in that regard. You know, the Jewish question was something that was pissing a lot of Russians off, including members of the party. That's something that people don't, people forget.

The people who study this often forget that. It was often party members that couldn't take it anymore. They weren't, Jews were not treated the same way as they were. In the Leningrad affair, these people were full-blooded Stalinists, every one of them. They never said a syllable that was anti-Stalin, anti-Soviet, anti-anything. And they were executed anyway because they talked about Russia as a, as a, important part of the Soviet Union. So,

Solent was doing this all over the place to many different groups. Now this is a book about the Jews, but in the way that we receive it here in the West, that's all that matters. And the public campaign was expanding, spreading into new fields and comprising new names. Anti-Jewish cleansing of cosmopolitons

was conducted in the Research Institute of the Academy of Science, Institute of Philosophers, of philosophy with its long history of internecine feuding between different cliques, the institutes of economy, law, in the Academy of Social Sciences at the CK of the VKPB, in the school of law, and then spread to the Office of Public Prosecutor. Thus, in the Department of History at Moscow State University, even a longstanding faithful communist and falsifier, I.I. Mince, member of the Academy, who enjoyed Stalin's personal Trusson was awarded with Stalin prizes and concurrently chaired historical departments in several

universities was labeled the head of cosmopolitans and historical science. After that, numerous scientific posts at M.G.U were liberated from his former students and other Jewish professors. Let me remind the listeners, I've said it a few times before about Hungary in the 20s. The entire Hungarian party that briefly took over. over, Hungary, under Balakon, was Jewish. I mean, every, everyone. And Salon, who was not lead to Soviet Union, but did have influence on foreign affairs,

beg them to find somebody, just grab somebody off the street who isn't a Jew and put them in charge, make them president. give him any power. So the president was somebody, I can never remember his name, he's so irrelevant. So a lot of this was to avoid accusation. This is simply a Jewish movement. This is a Jewish party. Nothing was more Jewish than the Hungarian Communist Party. And there's slaughter of anything Christian or agrarian at the time. So they finally, after months, found someone

they could make president. It was a short-lived, thank God for a horrific. It was a short-lived dictatorship. But they finally found some guy that was made president of Hungary who wasn't a Jew so that everyone can say, see, the president's not Jewish. And the same thing is happening here. Persia of Jews from technical fields and the natural sciences were gradually gaining momentum. The end of 1945 and all in 1946 were relatively peaceful for the Jews.

Jews of this particular social group. El Minenberg studied Jewish contributions in Soviet science and industry during the war. In 1946, the first serious blow since the end of the war was dealt to the administration and a big case was fabricated. Its principal victims were mainly Russians. There were no Jews among them, though investigative reports contained testaments against Israel Salomonovic Levin, director of the Saratov Aviation Plan. He was accused on the charge that during the Battle of Stalingrad, two aviation regiments were not able to take off because of manufacturing defects in the planes produced by the plant.

The charge was real, not made up by the investigators. However, Levin was neither fired nor arrested. In 1946, Vanikov, Kaganovich, Ginsburg, Mecklas all kept their ministry posts in the newly formed government, almost all Jewish former deputy ministers also retain their positions as assistance to ministers. The first victims among the Jewish technical elite appeared only in 1947. And that confirms what I just said. This wasn't aimed at Jews. Salon was not anti-Jewish whatsoever. He was the final semi, his entire existence. But when it came to appearances, he couldn't have too many Jews dominating all

these fields because anti-communists. What was Hitler saying about it? You know, this is a Jewish movement. He couldn't allow that to happen. So the purge had more to do with that than any worry about, you know, because so far we haven't been given a reason here of why Stalin did this. Thelton had no problem with Jews. He did have a problem, though, with public perception. In 1950, academic AFIAOFA was forced to retire from the post of the director of the Physical Engineering Institute, which he organized and headed since its inception in 1918. In 1951, 34 directors and 31 principal engineers of aviation plants have been fired. The list contained mostly Jews.

If in 1942, there were nearly 40 Jewish directors and principal engineers in the Ministry of General Machine Buildings, building, Ministry of Mortar Artillery, then only three remained in 1953. In the Soviet Army, the Soviet authorities persecuted not only Jewish generals, but lower-ranking officers working on the development of military technology and weaponry were also removed. Just since we've started here, we've gone through fields as diverse as, you know, physics to, you know, music criticism and theater criticism. Jews dominated every one of these. to a ridiculous degree. There were less than 2% of the population of the USSR.

And in my opinion, getting rid of them, this was the only reason to get rid of them was to keep that constant criticism from right-wingers, even though Hitler had been defeated, to destroy that criticism. Again, Stalin was not anti-Semitic. He was a phylo-Semite. obviously because this all happened under his watch

the fact that there were mostly Jews that there were nothing left when they got fired this is extraordinary but it just shows you there's more proof of our overall thesis that this is a Jewish movement Marxism in general and Soviet Marxism in particular and how many times that Solon here, right-wing leaders talk about this,

or even not even right-wing leaders from the revolution onward. And this is something that he couldn't handle anymore. Thus, the purging campaign spread over to the defense, airplane construction, and automobile industries, though they did not affect the nuclear branch, primarily removing Jews from administrative, directorial, and principal engineering positions. Later, purging was expanded onto various bureaucracies. Yet the genuine ethnic dominator was never mentioned in the formal paperwork.

Instead, the sacked officials faced charges of economic crimes or having relatives abroad at a time when conflict with the USA was expected or other excuses were used. The purging campaigns rolled over the central cities and across the provinces. The methods of these campaigns was notoriously Soviet in the spirit of the 1930s, a victim was inundated in a vicious atmosphere of terror and as a result often tried to deflect the threat to himself by accusing others. These men who were purged, they weren't killed. They weren't sent to the gulag.

Depending on their age, they were asked to retire or go into a different field or work, you know. On the other hand, Russian Orthodox people were being tortured to death on a regular basis. whatever was left of it by 1946-47. Now, in this particular chapter, he's all over the place in terms of years. And actually, that does matter because every year is different,

especially when it comes to the Jews and Israel. There's only two years that the Soviets really backed the Israeli cause. But at no time was any of this anti-Judaic what they did to Russian nationalists, well, what happened to the Leningrad affair? They were executed. These people were not executed. Very, very different kind of thing. By repeating the tide of 1937, albeit in a milder form,

the display of Soviet power reminded the Jews that they had never been truly integrated and could be pushed aside at any moment. We do not have indispensable people. However, Beria was tolerant of Jews, at least in appointments to positions in government. pushing Jews out of prestigious occupations that were crucial for the ruling elite in the spheres of manufacturing administration, cultural and ideological activities as well as limiting or completely barring the entrance of Jews into certain institutions of higher education gained enormous momentum in 1948 through 1953. Positions of any importance in the KGB, party apparatus, and military were closed to the Jews, and quotas were in place for admission into certain education. institutions and cultural and scientific establishments.

Through its fifth item, the question about nationality, Soviet Jews were oppressed by the very same method used in the proletarian questionnaire, other items of which were so instrumental in crushing the Russian nobility, clergy, intellectuals, and all the rest of the former people since the 1920s. Remember, Sultanin is quoting somebody. He's not saying this personally. but they were not oppressed. They simply got other jobs.

These former people, they were still around. They were still being at the underground church was very large, much larger than we realized. I wasn't alive, obviously I wasn't alive at the time, but it was said that the underground Soviet church was very, well, the Russian church in the Soviet Union was small. It was not. and in the 90s when they came to the surface, there were, you know, a million, two million members. But how bad must have the discrimination and violence against Russians must have been

to permit the fact that they dominated all of these fields to such a ridiculous degree by being less than 2% of the population. Quoting again, this whole paragraph is quoting, although the highest echelon of the Jewish political elite suffered from administrative perturbations, surprisingly it was not as bad as it seemed. It concludes G.V. Costorchenko, quote, the main blow fell on the middle and the most numerous stratum of the Jewish elite officials and also journalists, professors, and other members of the creative intelligentsia. It was these, so to say, nominal Jews, the individuals,

with nearly complete lack of ethnic ties, who suffered the brunt of the cleansing of the bureaucracies after the war. This has got to be the 20th time that I say something, and that exact thing is said again in the next paragraph. I'll tell you, this is eerie. However, speaking of scientific cadres, the statistics are these. At the end of the 1920s, there were 13.6% Jews among scientific research, researchers in the country. In 1937, 17.5%. And by 1950, their proportion slightly decreased to 15.4%.

25, 125 Jews among 162,508 Soviet researchers. S. Margulina, looking back from the end of the 1980s, concludes that, despite the scale of the campaign, after the war, the number of highly educated Jews in high positions always remained disproportionately high. But in contrast with the former times of happiness, it certainly had decreased. A.M. Kaffetz recalls a memoir article of a member of the Academy, Budker, one of the fathers of the Soviet A-bomb, where he described how they were building the first Soviet A-bomb, being exhausted from the lack of sleep and fainting from stress and overwork, and it is precisely those days of persecution of cosmopolitans that were the most inspired and the happiest in his life.

In 1949, among Stalin Prize laureates, no less than 13% were Jews, just like in the previous years. By 1952, there were only 6%. Data on the number of Jewish students in USSR were not published for nearly a quarter of a century, from the pre-war years until 1963. We will examine those in the next chapter. You know, this is, I wouldn't, I don't like using the word purge here. a purge implies that they were either sent to the camps or executed, and this was never the case. These remained allies and friends of the Soviet Union. It was their concentration, and no matter how much Salon tried to create a balance here, they still dominated these areas,

which in and of itself is a huge piece of evidence, the entirely Jewish nature of the Soviet Union. He was not a, again, he was not a Dysmetic. He just, he just didn't like the optics of this. But they still, you know, they still dominated the, they were less than 2% of the country. And it got him, we got Stalin worried. Barry, of course, was a Jew himself. He was surrounded by Jews. So Jews were the ones who were taking action against these, these Jews here.

So, you know, there was no, this is, this is a completely different, you know, the, the, Jewish literature on Stalin, which I've read many, many years ago, has him as just another Hitler. That allowed them to support Lenin and Trotsky, especially Trotsky. There's nothing wrong with Marxism. It's just Stalin. Stalin came in and ruined it. Look at what he did to the Jews. That's why they've created this.

So they weren't purged. Somebody got a job at another area. That's all. That was the worst of it. The genuine Jewish culture that had been slowly reviving after the war was curtailed and suppressed in 1948 through 1951. Jewish theaters were no longer subsidized and the few remaining ones were closed, along with book publishing houses, newspapers, and bookstores. In 1949, the international radio broadcasting in Yiddish was also discontinued. In the military, by 1953, almost all Jewish generals and approximately 300 colonels and lieutenant

colonels were forced to resign from their positions. I'll be going to stop here? Yeah, yeah, it's a natural break. We can be going in 50 minutes, yeah. As I mentioned, you know, an hour ago, the break between Stalin and Israel came with Israel's support of the American position and the Turkish position, I should say, in Korea. and the slow but sure deal-making with the American presidency rather than the Soviets.

Quite frankly, you know, 153, how many men were mobilized at the end of World War II in the Soviet Union? 15 million? Of course they're going to be, you know, not just Jews that were being demobilized, but it was everyone. they didn't need 15 million men under arms it just seems that way if you put if you just focus just on the on the Jews you know a lot of this stuff simply just wasn't necessary anymore so and and keep in mind

the split with with Israel was a big deal and the concern that a lot of these guys might that Israel was going to become an American possession, so, you know, laughable, rather than something that's loyal to the USSR. But this last one, the military, you know, 15 million men, at least underarms in 1945. Yeah, they're going to be retiring a lot of colonels, lieutenant colonels,

and everybody else for that matter, Jews and other, Jews and everything. All right. we will pick up at that break in the next episode. I want to encourage everybody to go over to the show notes, go over to the description on the videos, and donate to Dr. Johnson's work, buy his new book. That's another way that you can support Dr. Johnson's work. And I will try to link up to even more articles that I have put on my website and that I link to through the show notes. So, yeah, check all that out. Thank you.

Thank you, Dr. Johnson. I'll talk to you in a couple days. All right, my friend. I'll see you then. I want to welcome everyone back to our reading of 200 years together by Alexander Solzhenyson. This is episode number 108. How are you doing, Dr. Johnson? You know, I'm very happy to be living in the middle of nowhere.

Beautiful farmhouse, you know, fairly inexpensive. And we have very specific rural problems, problems that only only. rural people have. And I'll take those over anything else, any day of the week. And I've lived in all, I lived in all area, including the beach. And rural problems I'll take before I take any city problems or suburban problem. As somebody who grew up in the city and has lived in pretty much every kind of including on the beach. I agree with you 100%. I agree with you.

100%. It is. And it may just be once you get to a certain age. You're like, I don't want to deal with this anymore. Well, yeah, yeah. We don't really have neighbors. And just before we started recording, we were talking about the Starlink systems.

I have regular internet out here, which is I wasn't expecting. But, but connectivity and those kind of things, they could all be dealt with. Being murdered on the subway, different story. 100%. All righty. Picking up where we left off last time.

Here we go. As the incarcerated Jewish leaders remained jailed in LeBianka for over three years, Stalin slowly and with great caution proceeded in dismantling the E.A.K. He was very well aware what kind of international storm would be triggered by using force. Luckily, though, he acquired his first H-bomb in 1949. On the other hand, he fully appreciated the significance of unbreakable ties between world Jewry and America, his enemy since his rejection of the Marshall Plan. Investigation of E.A.K. Activities was reopened in January 1952. The accused were charged with connections to the Jewish nationalist organizations in America, with

providing information regarding the economy of the USSR to those organizations, and also with plans of repopulating Crimea and creating a Jewish republic there. Thirteen defendants were found guilty and sentenced to death. A whole bunch of Jewish names here. They were secretly executed in August. Aaron Berg, who was also a member of the E.A.K. was not even arrested. He assumed it was pure luck. Similarly, the crafty David Zislavski survived also.

And even after the execution of the Jewish writers, Aaronberg continued to reassure the West that those writers were still alive in writing. The annihilation of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee went along with similar secret daughter cases. 110 people were arrested. Ten of them were executed and five died during the investigation. Well, we're heading into the period of the doctor. doctor's plot. We're talking, we're getting very close to Stalin's death.

My opinion is that, you know, if Stalin, Stalin's seeing America as his enemy was absurd, despite what was going on in Korea. The U.S. was well aware what was going on with the economy, the USSR. I don't know how, how that would be a problem for him. information regarding the economy of the USSR. As I said last time, the only reason the Soviets rejected the Marshall Plan, the U.S. was desperate to give aid to them, was because they had to turn over most of their,

they have to essentially be audited. And they refused. So, but the U.S. was well aware of this. And there was no doubt that Jews were in contact with nationalist organizations. in America. I think there's a fine difference here, at least in Solomon's mind at the time, between Jewish nationalist and Zionist.

I tend to, most of us tend to use those simultaneously. I'm sorry, synonymously. But, you know, I think there's, you know, nationalism of any kind was rejected. Zionism seemed to have worked fairly well within the Soviet system. Lenin, you know, was a reader of Moses Hess. So you have to remember also at this period of time, Gentiles of all stripes were being locked up and sent to the gulag and destroyed and everything else.

So, and also the destruction of the Jewish anti-fascist committee, which is what the E.A.K. refers to. in, you know, Russian letters, transliterated, were done by Jews. And we've already gone through that. And I'm pretty sure that the plan to repopulate Crimea in creating a Jewish republic with Stalin's idea just a few years earlier,

or at least something that he vaguely supported. It would also be no reason to remove the Tartars. so a lot of this a lot of this simply doesn't add up and remember this is in the middle of the Korean War big problem and North Korea was

a Soviet client state it wasn't really a Chinese client state it was a Soviet client state despite Chinese intervention but you know this was one aspect of Stalin's repression. So, you know, it's, he began to, he began to, near the end of his life, he began to

distrust any nationalist. Zionism is a little different because by 1950, um, Israel, well, Israel had supported, you know, the West vaguely in, um, in Korea. And that was a huge break. between Stalin's support of the state of Israel and his rejection of it. So now he's starting to see a lot of these guys as opponents, where before he wouldn't have had any reason to. So there's a lot of other factors and variables going on here. You have to take into consideration. In autumn of 1952, Stalin went into the open as arrests among Jews began,

such as arrests of Jewish professors of medicine and among members of literary circles in Kiev in October 1952. This information immediately spread among Soviet Jews and throughout the entire world. On October 17th, Voice of America broadcasts about mass repressions among Soviet Jews. Soviet Jews were frozen by mortal fear. The only time it was acceptable socially in the West to be anti-communist was when repressions came against the Jews. That was the only time. But the trade kept flowing.

The knowledge of the Soviet economy kept going. There had hundreds of students, Soviet students in Western universities who went back. When I say trade, I'm just talking about, you know, grain and oats. also mean highly advanced systems. Either dual use systems or just pure out of pure weaponry.

This is still, we still have the generation of those who support us Stalin in World War II. We got to remember that. The problem was, as always, Israel. Stalin then became worried once the state of Israel. Tel Aviv supported the American side. I don't think they did anything about it, but at least at the UN and other places, they supported the American side, and then

now we got a problem. Soon afterwards, in November and Prague, a show trial of Slansky, the Jewish first secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party and several other top state and party leaders took place in a typically loud and populist-Salinist-type entourage. The trial was openly anti-Jewish with naming world-leading Jews such as Ben-Gurion and Morgenthau, and placing them in league with American leaders Truman and Atchison. The outcome was that 11 were hanged, eight Jews among them. Summing up the official version, Kay Gottwald said, quote, this investigation in court trial disclosed a new channel through which treason and espionage permeated the Communist Party.

This is Zionism, end quote. Yeah, it's hard to argue. It's exactly what was happening. I've mentioned before, and I have a paper which is not quite finished yet, on the split between world jewelry on the one hand and the USSR, and even Marxism in general, on the other. And again, Israel was one of the factors. It was really hard for Jewish communists, which were a huge percentage, to want to see. Israel destroyed or harmed in any way. They might not even agree with him.

And so Stalin was right in this case. You know, he was, you know, if you have uploaded the paper to your site on Stalin and Israel, and Truman and Atterson figure quite tremendously in that. If our readers read that, they'll get more detail in it. There's quite a bit of, um, um, there's some good readers. reason for someone to think this way. That paper will be included in the show notes of this episode and then all episodes going forward. I can't go back and add it to over 100 episodes. No, no, no, no, no. I don't exactly expect that. Yeah, yeah, look for the, look for the latest

to read that paper and it'll connect to my site. I already, I did that today, actually. All right. At the same time, since summer of 1951, the development of the doctor's plot was gaining momentum. The case included the accusation of prominent physicians, doctors to the Soviet leadership for the criminal treatment of state leaders. For the secret services, such as an accusation, was nothing new, as similar accusations had been made against Professor Pletnev and physicians Levin and Nazakoff already during the Bukharin, trial in 1937. At that time, the gullible Soviet public gasped at such utterly evil plots.

No one had any qualms about repeating the same old scenario. You know, I was just reading, of course, reading about the doctor's plot, this is one of the big pieces of evidence that the Jews all over the place, you know, claim that Stalin was anti-Semitic. The medical field was so dominated by Jews. And in these particular cases. I'm talking about particulars. There was some evidence that there was true malpractice. Whether it's politically motivated or not is a separate issue because these guys who were in the Soviet leaders who were killed weren't necessarily involved in foreign policy or anything else like that. Again, remember, we're coming very close to the end of Stalin's life.

he had a horrible death he had wolves dragging him down somewhere or at least eyewitnesses said that Lenin felt like he was being tormented by electricity which was his obsession

throughout the early USSR so this may also reflect not any kind of anti-Semitism but the fact that Stalin Stalin was actually, you know, starting to fall apart mentally. Now we know much more about the doctor's plot. Initially, it was not entirely anti-Jewish action.

The prosecution list contained the name of several prominent Russian physicians as well. In essence, the affair was fueled by Stalin's generally psychotic state of mind, with his fear of plots and mistrust of the doctors, especially as his health deteriorated. By September 1952, prominent doctors were arrested in groups. Investigations unfolded with cruel beatings of suspects and wild accusations. Slowly it turned into a version of spying terrorist plot connected with foreign intelligence organizations, American hirelings, saboteurs in white coats, bourgeois nationalism, all indicating that it was primarily aimed at Jews. Robert Conquest and the Great Terror follows this particular.

particularly tragic line of involvement of highly placed doctors. In 1935, the false death certificate of Kubshev was signed by doctors Kaminsky, Kuterovsky, and Levin. In 1937, they signed a similar false death certificate of Orgesk, Kizzi. I remember trying to pronounce that name previous. Yeah, he's a Georgian. It's okay. They know so many deadly secrets. Could they expect anything but their own death? Conquest writes that Dr. Levin had cooperated with the Cheka since 1920. Quote, working with Zürzinski, Machinsky, and Yagoda, he was trusted by the head of such an organization. It is factually correct to consider Levin, a member of Yagota's circle in the NKVD.

Further, we read something sententious. Among those outstanding doctors who in 1937 moved against Pletnev and and who had signed fierce accusative resolutions against him, we find the names of Vovsi, Kogan, Zelenin, who in their turn were subjected to torture by MGB in 1952 to 53 in connection with the case of Dr. Saboteurs, as well as two other doctors, Sherewski and Vinagradov, who provided a pre-specified death certificate for Mijensky.

Robert Conquest is actually, he's a neocon, but for anti-communists the world over, he was very valuable. He thinks everything, you know, he's one of the people who believes that Stalin was anti-Semitic. He was just another Hitler. But I don't want any of this. I mean, he, you know,

Olseninson has already stated that despite all of this, Jews still dominated the USSR in the bureaucracy. None of this changed that. In fact, he would have to, you know, drain this massive swamp. I mean, everything was state-owned.

So in terms of the medical profession, again, he, Sond did not trust doctors. He was a sick man, and he was losing his grip on power. So to what extent this directly came from Stalin here at this late date, I don't know. On January 3, 1953, Pravda and Izvestia published an announcement by Tass about the arrest of a group of doctors saboteurs. The accusation sounded like a grave threat for Soviet Jewry, and at the same time, by degrading Soviet custom,

prominent Soviet Jews were forced to sign a letter to Pravda, with the most severe condemnation of the wiles of the Jewish bourgeois nationalists, and their approval of Stalin's government. Several dozens signed the letters, a list of them here. Initially, Aaronberg did not sign it. He found the courage to write a letter to Stalin to ask your advice. His resourcefulness was unsurpassed indeed. To Aaronberg, it was clear that, quote,

there is no such thing as the Jewish nation, and that assimilation is the only way and that Jewish nationalism inevitably leads to betrayal. Yet that the letter that was offered to him to say, sign could be invidiously inferred by the enemies of our country. He concluded that I myself cannot resolve these questions, but if leading comrades will let me know that my signature is desired and useful for protecting our homeland and for peace in the world, I will sign it immediately. The draft of that statement of loyalty was painstakingly prepared in the administration of the

Central Committee, and eventually its style became softer and more respectful. However, the The letter never appeared in the press. Possibly because of the international outrage, the doctor's plot apparently began to slow down in the last days of Stalin. After the public announcement, the doctors plot created a huge wave of repression of Jewish physicians all over the country. In many cities and towns, the offices of state security began fabricating criminal cases against Jewish doctors. They were afraid to even to go to work, and their patients were afraid to be treated by them. after the cosmopolitan campaign, the menacing growl of people's anger and reaction to the doctor's plot

utterly terrified many Soviet Jews and a rumor arose and then got rooted in the popular mind that Stalin was planning a mass eviction of Jews to the remote parts of Siberia and North, a fear reinforced by the examples of post-war deportation of entire peoples. In his latest work, Kostrchenko, a historian and a scrupulous research, of Stalin's Jewish policies very thoroughly refutes this myth of deportation, proving that it had never been confirmed either then or subsequently by any facts, and even in principle, such deportation would not have been possible. The entire huge chunks of the bureaucracy, of the intellectual class, physicians would have

been deport. There would be almost no Soviet Union. Yes, of course they were a minority, but their numbers, even after this, within these key fields were extremely high. You know, 16, 17, 18%, sometimes more depending on the area. Now, I don't know what with the menacing growl of people's anger refers to. there generally was a the people usually refers to party members when they when communists talk about the people

they're usually referring to their supporters but any kind of removal any kind of just shows you the the Doroticism here it would have been utterly impossible for any deportation of Jews as such

now maybe it's Stalin was losing it and things like that. We had the same situation with Brezhnev later on. But there's simply no way. Yeah, we can talk about entire peoples. Yeah, you know, Chuvash and Tartars. No, they don't exactly have the significance in the Soviet system as Jews do. one of the big problems that supporting Israel between the years

1948 and 1950 or 51 was that if Jews were going to leave and go there huge numbers of some of their intellectuals were going to be gone later on it became a huge issue in the 70s but we all know I'll finish this paper by the time we get to that era. But wait a minute, we have Jews who have been trained in the military arts. They have, you know, top secret clearance, and they're going to Israel, an ally of the U.S. We got a big problem with that.

So at this point, intellectuals were looked on, Jewish intellectuals were looked on very negatively. Because who knows who wanted to go? Who wanted to leave? You couldn't just come and go freely in the Soviet Union. But those with especially, you know, strategic, you know, military educations who knew things, who knew serious things about the Soviet system, especially the military system, yet they couldn't just be allowed to leave and just go, you know, all the money that they spent in educating these people.

and beyond that. And of course, you know, that's when, and they said it. You know, this was, you know, years later. And the Jackson-Vannock Amendment came into existence precisely because in the 70s, the Soviet Union said we can't allow it. And so we're going to put sanctions for the first time on the USSR unless you let these Jews go. so Israel then was had a had a influx of so overwhelmingly Russian Jews you know Soviet Jews that they had no connection with Israel but with the Israelites we do they do not with a tremendous amount of military knowledge from the USSR educated by you know their ostensible opponent of military knowledge from the USSR educated by you know their ostensible opponent

So this was, you know, any sense of worry about deportation, you know, let me know how journalists are, especially Jewish ones. And they love to create these scenarios. You did have a panic among Jews in the U.S. at the time. But they're, oh my God, you know, we have, you know, six million over there that are going to be deported or removed or neutral some way or another. And so this was a beginning, the very beginning of the split between Jews and the Soviet system.

It took 20 years because Khrushchev, when he took over, he eliminated all of these cases, all these arrests. It was all gone. He rehabilitated these guys who were shot. and at the same time renewed a massive attack on the Orthodox Church, which they're connected, and I think we all know that. So for Jews to believe that there was any chance of them, you know, if you're one of these people who just refuses to believe

that Jews were a dominant part of the Soviet system, even at this point talking about deportation makes sense but we all know better we know that Jews were a huge part of the Soviet Union under Stalin.

Stalin was not anti-Semitic someone was not anti-Jewish but Israel again was a huge part of the problem especially after 1950 1951 and this was the beginning it took a while

this was the beginning. Had Khrushchev not been overthrown, maybe it would have been different. But, you know, after, you know, in the 60s, for example, the Soviets are supporting Egypt, Iraq, Syria, and the U.S. is supporting Israel. So Soviet Jews are in a strange position And a lot of them didn't like that position And the leadership was aware of it That's where the real split Became started Here you see cracks in the system

The cracks between the relationship between Judaism And Soviet Marxism You know maybe it is a Maybe it is this a goyam thing after all Agoia movement after all So this is the beginning of that, and that's why it's extremely significant. But it is amazing how bewildered were those circle of Soviet Jews who were unfailingly loyal to the Soviet communist ideology. Many years later, S.K. told me, there was no single action in my life that I am as ashamed of as my belief in the genuineness of the doctor's plot of 1953, that they perhaps involuntarily were involved in a foreign conspiracy.

Yeah, remember what Stalin was to the Jews. This was the man that defeated Adolf Hitler. And that gave him almost a legendary status. It was a little bit later where that image was tarnished after his death. But you had, I can't speculate. But the majority, especially of older Jews, would still be Stalin. on us, regardless of all this stuff. I have been informed by many boomers that their parents were the ones who defeated Adolf Hitler.

I'll have you nobody. You don't know how many times I've had that exact same tone. I've had that conversation. But on a serious note, 85% of German. casualties were on the eastern front. And, you know, it's not like, you know, the West didn't do it. Battle of Britain, of course, destroyed a good chunk of the Luswaffe. But no, it's true.

The USSR, that invasion, although Hitler didn't have any choice in the matter whatsoever. He had no chance of winning. He did just enough damage to keep him from invading. And he pretty much did anyway by taking all of Eastern Europe, including Poland, East Germany. It's a miracle he didn't take Finland and Austria. The line was drawn with like Greece and Turkey, but that was a local matter, not the matter of, you know, the U.S. was fighting this or anything. So, yeah, the Soviet Union lost a ridiculous number. overwhelmingly of men

because men are the only ones who die in wars, not women. Women are civilians who are they die that way, but I'm always irritated with the men and women of the armed forces. No, men are the ones who get captured, POWs. Men are the ones who die. Men are the ones who get shot.

The percentage of women from the American women who died in World War II in combat is exactly zero. You did have female partisans, however, in the Soviet Union, but the point is, and they were very Jewish, by the way. But it does not surprise me in the least that Jews, as the years go on, the older Jews will remain loyal to Joseph Stalin. Yeah, I had some Gentile boomer, actually, very recently within the last week and a half

or so on social media. she had commented that her father was part of the, um, was, was part of the first group, the first, um, troops against Auschwitz and, and free them and the horrors he saw. And she was not happy when I,

she was not happy when I asked her, you know, how her father, you know, um, if her father was Russian and if he was serving in the 60th army. yet the Red Army captured that

and I've heard that again a thousand times there's even been movies where that's been depicted I'm not saying that professors will say that they won't you know that's too stupid to say but yeah

when I deal with these people you know when I was growing up the world where two generation was still around my parents were not boomers they were greatest generation they were born in the 30s. Thank God I didn't have to worry about the boomerism. So we went from the greatest generation to generation X.

That's okay. But, you know, I've, what I tend to say is, you know, my father almost was killed in Korea, a war which wouldn't have happened had Hitler won World War II. same thing for Vietnam and anything against Marxism or against the growth of the Soviet your victory made that possible you fought on the wrong side

and I'm in a position where I could say stuff like that well socially speaking it doesn't go over very well well I heard that the next Holocaust movie is they're going to have black American female soldiers freeing Auschwitz No, I've seen, you know, mock up pictures, you know, of the black units that rescue Jews from the camps. So an article from the 1960s states that in spite of a pronounced anti-Semitism of Stalin's rule, many Jews prayed that Stalin stayed alive as they knew through experience at any period of weak power means a slaughter of Jews.

We were well aware of the quite rowdy mood of the fraternal nations toward us. Well, you know, there's a bit of a point to that. You know, it's sort of like, you know, Assad and Hussein keeping a lid on the extreme Islamist movements. It's very similar here. Another example would be, you know, witchcraft. Waring about witchcraft usually happened in places where the state was weak. so but I don't know

I don't know if your typical Jew would actually see it that way that level of sophistication there was a period of there was kind of an interregnum there in 1953 and Khrushchev really took over it by himself but to think that

that would even matter where you have Jews heavily armed throughout the military and and various police forces. It's, again, typical neuroticism. They just have this. If there's no fight, they're going to create a fight.

It's absolutely absurd. On February 9th, a bomb exploded at the Soviet embassy in Tel Aviv. On February 11, 1953, the USSR broke off diplomatic relations with Israel. The conflict surrounding the doctor's plot intensified due to these events. And then Stalin went wrong, and not for the very first time. right? He did not understand how the thickening of the plot could threaten him personally, even within the secure quarters of his inaccessible, inaccessible political Olympus. The explosion of international anger coincided with the rapid action of internal forces,

which could possibly have done away with Stalin. It could have happened through Beria, for example, according to Aftor Hanof's version. There is a theory. You know, there are plenty of Russian nationalists out there. more like Soviet patriots or national Bolsheviks that I worry about, especially in Russia, that say that Stalin was being gradually poisoned. And that then he was killed on Purim. I don't know if that's true. Or he died on Purim, exactly.

I don't know if that's true or not. But it is a common theory. He wasn't worried about himself personally anyway. But I do love the phrase, inaccessible political Olympus. I got to use that. I got to use that. It's an excellent line.

But I'm not sure with the international anger, was that aimed at what? Was that aimed at the bombing? Including a Jewish group. So, well, regardless, Stalin wasn't going anywhere. there was very little support for getting rid of him within, at least among those who had any chance of being able to do anything about it. And remember the constant purges.

He had loyalists everywhere, including Jews. After a public communique about the doctor's plot, Stalin lived only 51 days. The release from custody and the acquittal of the doctors without trial were perceived by the older generation of Soviet Jews as a repetition of the Purim miracle. Stalin had perished on the day of Purim when Esther saved the Jews of Persia from Haman. On April 3rd, all of the surviving accused in the doctor's plot were released. It was publicly announced the next day. And yet again, it was a Jews who pushed a frozen history forward. Yeah, the Jews make far too much of the doctor's plot, at least at the very least because Stalin was not in history.

his right mind at the time. I think Stalin died simply, you know, organ failure. I don't think he was murdered. I've read the articles in Russian on that, and they're, I don't know, at best I'm on the fence. But he did irritate Jews, but again, he was still surrounded by them. It was a very odd situation here. and it proved that he was not anti-Jewish.

He had them, you know, even after all of this, even after all this happened, the day Stalin died, Jews still dominated in media and medicine and everything else, only maybe a slightly lessen number. Slightly. So these are things that they take and make a very big deal out of them. and as I mentioned before

Crucev had you know dropped all this stuff Crucev needed Jewish support to stay in power and he and he courted it pretty blatantly but as I've said before and this is an extremely important point the belief that Stalin was anti-Jewish

or anti-Semitic comes from the refusal to accept the fact that Bolivism was largely a Jewish movement, especially in the 20s. Going after the old Bolsheviks, going after any of the people who went after, Jews are going to be a huge number of them. The old Bolsheviks, the old revolutionary generals, etc.,

tended to be partisan Jews. And it appeared that he was, anti-Jewish. He wasn't. There were just so many of them. So they certainly can't admit in public that Bolshevism was Jewish, like we do, like Putin did, like so many others do. So they came up with the idea that Stalin just hated Jews for no reason. Oh, and by the way, just two weeks ago, three weeks ago, I did a lecture at Radio Albion on the book of Esther. in the Old Testament. It does belong in the Old Testament.

And I explain in great detail why. All righty. We will be back with a new chapter in a couple days. It'll be chapter 23 before the sixth day war. So I guess that's just a period from 53 to 67. Everything that was going on between then. As I always do, go over to the show notes and go over to the description of the videos and click on the links and donate to Dr. Johnson by his new book.

Another way you can support him and show him that you appreciate the kind of work that he's doing here. Thank you, Dr. Johnson. I appreciate you. I really appreciate your help. You know, I do need it right now. Don't forget my book on the Ukrainian War is out. I haven't checked if it's doing well. I don't even know.

But anyway, join my Patreon. We had a nice little nationalist community over there. And I appreciate you for promoting that in every show. I thank you. Of course. Talk to you in a couple days. All right, my friend. I want to welcome everyone back to our reading of 200 years together by Alexander Sol Shonieson.

This is episode 109. Dr. Johnson, how are you doing today? What episode is exactly? It's episode 109. 109. Okay. Well, you know, I have a purebred mankoum, Susie Cream Cheese. And she is the maincuniest of any main coon I've ever seen in my life. I met her whole family. She's purebred as you can be. I've met everyone in her family.

Cousins when I picked her up. And we got her spayed yesterday. And you know, sometimes they have to wear the outfit, the shirt, you know, so they can't get to the they can't get to the incision and do anything bad down. And it's just, it's heartbreaking. She doesn't like it. She's still, still, even this morning, out of it from the, I trust the vet. I know the vet very well.

But it's just, you know, I can't wait for her to get that thing off. And I'm sure she's right there with me. So it's just, there was a part of me that maybe she should be bred because she's just so, so pure and such a perfect, example of a man koon, but nah, I don't want to deal with heat or anything like that. So she has to go around on this crazy outfit. It's just like a shirt with,

that's tied in the back. And she's not the happiest kidding in the world. So it'll be off in a week or so. Poor girl. Yeah. Yeah. They hate that. The cone of shame.

I think it's better than the cone. I think it's better than the cone of shame, but marginally better. Yeah. All righty. We're starting a new chapter today. Chapter 23 before the Six Day War. If you are ready, I'm ready.

I am. On the next day after Stalin's death on March 6th, the MGB, Ministry of State Security, ceased to exist, albeit only formally, as Beria had incorporated it into his own Ministry of Internal Affairs, the MVD. This move allowed him to disclose the abuses by the MGB, including those of the still public. publicly unannounced MGB minister Ignatiov, who secretly replaced Abakumov. It seems that after 1952, Beria was losing Stalin's trust and had been gradually pushed out by Ignatyev Rumen during the doctor's plot. Thus, by force of circumstances, Beria became a magnet for the new anti-Stalin opposition. And now on April 4th, just a month after Stalin's death, he enjoyed enough power to dismiss the doctor's plot and accused Rumen of its fabrication.

Then three months later, the diplomatic relations with Israel were restored. Yeah, for time, you know, it's almost funny in the darkest possible way to hear Beria and then later Khrushchev talk about Stalin's abuses, as if they weren't in high positions carrying out these abuses. Khrushchev in Ukraine, Beria, of course, being handed the police. That somehow, that, you know, I guess people bought it.

It was just a tactic. They were very much a part of it. They carried it out, but now that Stalin is gone. They figure they could get some political capital in condemning it. But the problem is, we'll talk about this more later on,

but I want to say it straight out. this is the beginning of the end for the Soviet Union. Once people like Beria and Khrushchev started condemning Stalin, this all-powerful warlord who defeated Hitler, then factions began. Then you had factions in the party, in the state, in the military, and everywhere else. And the population was a little bit confused by this all-powerful, all-knowing leader now being challenged. Now, who do we listen to? And it took a long time for it to really show itself. It showed itself probably in the beginning by the early 70s.

And then, of course, when the party went out of existence, formally out of existence in 1991. But this is where it started. This is where it started. And, of course, Beria being a Jew, although an eccentric one, I believe he was Karait. But yes, the doctor's plot, all that was completely dismissed.

And there was a huge shakeup. Stalin wasn't even cold yet. So this was really a huge, this was a major division in Soviet history. All this reinvigorated hope among the Soviet Jews, as the rise of barrier could be very promising for them. However, Berya was soon ousted. Yet because of the usual Soviet inertia, quote, with the death of Stalin, many previously fired Jews were reinstalled in their former positions.

During the period called the Thaw, many old Zionists were released from the camps. During the post-Stalin period, the first Zionist group started to emerge, initially at local levels, end quote. This is exactly what I'm talking about. The Thaw refers to the, um, the, the alleged it refers to two things the alleged

easing up on restrictions and the tyranny of the Soviet system as well as beginnings of some kind

of detente with the West and of course you had plenty people who were opposed to that so that's what the thaw means I think it's mostly

a myth it's mostly a PR term but they convince a number of people that, academics believe it. You know, and, of course, it was a wonderful time for the Jews.

And, you know, while there was some recognition for the Israeli state, it really didn't matter because the Soviet policy, pretty much 60s, 70s, 80s was to support Syria and Iraq in Egypt. And as the Jews pulled away from the Soviet system in this period of time, Zionism became an enemy of the USSR. Yet once again, the things began to turn unfavorably for the Jews. In March 1954, the Soviet Union vetoed the UN Security Council attempt to open the Suez Canal to Israeli ships. At the end of 195, Khrushchev declared a pro-Arab anti-Israel turn of Soviet foreign policy. In February 1956, in his famous report at the 20th Party Congress,

Khrushchev, while speaking profusely about the massacres of 1937 and 38, did not point any attention to the fact that there were so many Jews among the victims. He did not name Jewish leaders executed in 1952, and when speaking of the doctor's plot, he did not stress that it was specifically directed against the Jews. Quote, it is easy to imagine the bitter feelings this aroused among the Jews. They swept the Jewish communist circles abroad, and even the leadership of those communist parties where Jews, constituted a significant percentage of numbers, such as in the Canadian and U.S. Communist parties, end quote. In April 1956 in Warsaw, under the communist regime, though with heavy Jewish influence, the Jewish newspaper Volkshgema, published a sensational article listing the names of Jewish cultural and social celebrities who perished from 1937 to 1938 and from 1948 to 1952. Yet at the same time, the article also condemned the capitalist enemies, Beria's period, and welcomed the return of a Leninist nationalist policy.

Quote, the article in Volkstrauma had unleashed a storm. And this is what I mean. This is the last thing that the Soviet Union needed was a storm. You know, World War II wasn't that long ago. It was a shock that Stalin led. There was a certain twisted security under a totalitarian leader. who was all knowing, all seeing, and was immovable because of the victory over the Germans. Now you didn't have anyone like that.

Now you had factions all over the place, and the more Khrushchev spoke or Beria or anyone else, the more factions developed. And now you didn't have a single party apparatus. You had a situation where a consensus had to be created. and that ended a little bit under, under Brezhnev, but Brezhnev wasn't exactly charismatic and didn't win any major wars. So he tried to reverse some of that. But yeah, Khrushchev unleashed a storm,

and it took a long time for it to die down. International communist organizations in Jewish social circles loudly began to demand an explanation from the Soviet leaders. Quote, throughout 1956, foreign visitors of the Soviet Union openly asked about the Jewish situation there, and particularly why the Soviet government has not yet abandoned the dark legacy of Stalinism on the Jewish question. End quote. It became a recurrent theme for the foreign correspondents in visiting delegations of fraternal communist parties.

Actually, that could be the reason for the loud denouncement in the Soviet press of the betrayal of communism by Howard Fast, an American writer and former enthusiastic champion of communism. Meanwhile, quote, hundreds of Soviet Jews from different cities in one form or another participated in meetings of resurgent Zionist groups and coteries. Old Zionists with connections to relatives or friends in Israel were active in these groups, end quote. And the big faction, of course, since Jews were always, you know, even though they didn't have the numbers, there were still the dominant mentality, the dominant faction in Soviet.

Soviet policy, the very existence of the state of Israel and the realization that they can get a much better deal with the U.S. and they could with the USSR and that Jews in the Soviet Union now had to kind of pick, are they going to oppose a state that's meant to be for them, or they're going to support the USSR? And that was a huge problem. And I think that's what we're getting into right now. In May, 1956, a delegation from the French Socialist Party arrived in Moscow. Quote, particular attention was paid to the situation of Jews in the Soviet Union, end quote. Khrushchev found himself in a hot corner.

Now he could not afford to ignore the questions, yet he knew, especially after experiencing post-war Ukraine, that the Jews are not likely to be returned to their high social standing, like in the 1920s and 1930s. He replied, quote, in the beginning of the revolution, we had many Jews and executive bodies of party and government. After that, we have developed new cadres. If Jews wanted to occupy positions of leadership in our republics today, it would obviously cause discontent among the local people.

If a Jew appointed to a high office surrounds himself with Jewish colleagues, it naturally provokes envy and hostility towards all Jews. The French publication, the French publication socialist Harold calls strange and false. The Cruz Jeff point about surrounding himself with Jewish colleagues. In the same discussion, when Jewish culture and schools were addressed, Khrushchev explained that, quote, if Jewish schools were established, there probably would not be many prospective students. The Jews are scattered all over the country.

If the Jews were required to attend a Jewish school, it certainly would cause outrage. It would be understood as a kind of ghetto. Well, it might be a ghetto, but it might be an elite ghetto. That term is used and abused. It's like, you know, racism or sexism or anything else. The point that Cruz is making is one we all know to be true. And it certainly was the case in the USSR, in the U.S. or anywhere, that once a Jew, and there were plenty of Jews in high offices at the time.

So I'm not really sure what he's talking about, but hypothetically, he knows that a Jew in high office will surround himself with other Jews, regardless of merit. And that's exactly what happened. that's been the case for a thousand years prior to that. We've dealt with it in the Tsarist Russia and everywhere else. And he's coming close to saying that, well, they're kind of a, you know, as we said before, a mafia organization organized crime within whether it be Zarath Russia or the USSR. They didn't care about ideology. The ideology might be useful, but that wasn't the most important thing.

Trotsky didn't care about ideology. It might be useful. All of a sudden he reversed himself when he was condemning Stalin. But that's all it ever was. To say that Jews were not likely to be returned to their highest social standing in the 2030s, it's simply false. They were. And the myth of Stalin as the anti-Semite was already being created now. And this was one of the huge issues with the big factions that were developing.

than the Soviet Union that rendered it weaker and people had to pick one. You know, party members, I think by this time were maybe, you know, 5 million or fewer of the population. And they had to pick aside. They couldn't be neutral on it.

And the Jewish question was one. But Jews were always the backbone of the USSR until rough Crucef was overthrown in 64 Jews began to realize that the Soviets were falling behind and the U.S., especially in the 70s,

was moving ahead of everybody, especially in high tech and all of that. And, well, where the money is, that's where they're going to go. Again, one more faction if the Soviets were in a better financial position after World War II or even in this period it would have been the case that they could have continued to support Israel but the Israeli state realized

you know it was much easier to penetrate the American state system because it was a republic versus this versus the Soviet Union that had a supreme leader and a political bureau. It was much easier to manipulate individual politicians in the U.S. So for all those reasons, you know, I remember the anti-Zionist rabbis, Rabbi David Weiss, who always told me, he said the biggest problem with Israel,

well, there were many problems with Israel, the state of Israel, is that it requires, it's not a viable state on its own, therefore it requires, requires that Jews take over or at least strongly influence the foreign policy apparatus of some of the great powers. And it seemed that in the USSR, that wasn't going to happen anymore. So the U.S. was clearly was better off. We talked about the, in my paper on the Stalinist creation of Israel, there was some serious discontent among American policymakers under Truman Eisenhower. that Israel is going to alienate the Arabs,

the Arabs control the oil, and so we have the big problem there. But the Soviets didn't care, as we've already, I think I've mentioned here, or it was just in the paper. I said the Soviets viewed the Arabs as too backwards, and ignorant for Marxism, but they were willing to use them as a necessity. city. You know, the Ba'ath party was not a communist party by any means. And yet it was very close

to the Soviet Union and Soviet supplies. They took what they can get. So there's a lot going on in this paragraph here. But once Stalin died and you had some chaos and then Khrushchev takes over, you know, the Soviet Union was never the same again. Three months later in August, 1956, a delegation, of the Canadian Communist Party visited the USSR, and it stated outright that it had, quote, a special mission to achieve clarity on the Jewish question, end quote. Thus, in the post-war years, the Jewish question was becoming a central concern of the Western communists.

Quote, Khrushchev rejected all accusations of anti-Semitism as a slander against him in the party, end quote. He named a number of Soviet Jews to important posts, quote, he even mentioned his Jewish daughter-in-law, end quote, but then he, quote, quite suddenly switched to the issue of good and bad features of each nation and pointed out several negative features of Jews, among which he mentioned their political unreliability. Yet he never mentioned any of their positive traits, nor did he talk about other nations. The biggest problem with Khrushchev was his inability.

He was very impulsive. He kind of said whatever was on his mind, just whatever it was. This is part of the reason why he was overthrown. He was very crude. I don't know how much of Soviet or Lenin's ideology he really knew. He was somewhat of an ignoramus. Most of his policies failed, especially the Virgin Lands program in Central Asia. Again, you had starvation threatening the USSR, but of course the U.S.

are going to bail them out, as they always did. But saying these kind of things, you just need. never knew what he was going to say. He was too, he really wasn't a politician. If it was on his mind, he was going to burn it out in the microphone. You never quite knew what it was going to be. In the same conversation, Khrushchev expressed his agreement with Stalin's decision against establishing a Crimean Jewish Republic, stating that such Jewish colonization of the Crimea would be a strategic military risk for the Soviet Union. This statement was particularly hurtful to the Jewish community. The Canadian delegation insisted on a publication of a specific statement by the

Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union about the suffering of Jews, quote, but it was met with firm refusal as other nations and republics, which also suffered from various crimes against their culture and intelligentsia, would ask with astonishment why this statement only covers Jews. As Schwartz dismissively comments, the pettiness of this argumentation is striking. Yeah, we all know about Solomon Schwartz. I think our listeners have figured that out now. And it just, this is just more evidence that the USSR was a Jewish project to a great extent. No one talked about the Armenians this way. No one talks about the Georgians this way, despite them being fairly elite, you know, high, very high IQ people that tended to produce over there. republics produced over their quotas, very few places that were able to do that. So they were

kind of left alone. It was Jews, Jews, Jews everywhere you went. And because of the massive number of Jews in the Western parties, Western Europe, the U.S., they came to the Soviet Union, so they cared about. You know, to them, as London said, over and over and over again, anti-Semitism is anti-communism, and anti-communism is anti-Semitism. And anti-communism is anti-Semitism. And I don't think he fully realized the implications of what that meant, but he said it many times. And, but Schwartz, someone like him, that's all he cared about. There was only one group of people who mattered in the Soviet Union that was the Jews. This also, by the way, starts a time of a massive increase in clamping down on the Orthodox Church.

A bunch of underground churches were exposed and sent to the camps. there really wasn't much left at this point, but there were some. The official church that Stalin had created, you know, had to kind of cover for it, which was a shame. If you read in the Moscow, the journal of the Moscow Patriarchate, there were such, you know, boot liquors. But no one asked about that too much. And so, yeah, there was no clamp down on Jews, but there certainly was a massive increase in the murder or arrest. of the of orthodox people of whatever background in the in the in the Soviet Union at this time yet it did not end at that quote secretly influential foreign jewish communists tried to obtain explanations about the fate of the jewish cultural elite end quote and in the october the same year 26 western quote progressive jewish leaders and writers and quote appealed publicly to prime minister bulganin and president voroshalov asking them to issue a public statement about injustices committed against Jews and the measures the government had designed to restore the Jewish cultural institutions.

They weren't powerful enough. These new offices, you know, prime minister and president, to a great extent, they were influential. But the Constitution is nothing more than a piece of paper. And they were able to approach Khrushchev about things. the piece of paper said that they had certain powers, but in reality, it was only Khrushchev in the, in the, um, GGB that had the final say about things. However, we're getting into a period of time where certain factions, um, were able to use these new offices. Um, it's people who even know it was a prime minister, really? That was the president. It just shows you how, how, how minor their roles really were.

yet during both the interregnum of 1953 to 1957 and then in crucephs period the soviet policies towards jews were inconsistent wary circumspect and ambivalent thus spending thus sending signals in all directions in particular the summer in 1956 which was filled with all kinds of social expectations in general had also become the apogee of jewish hopes one serkhov the head of the union of right in a conversation with a communist publisher from New York City mentioned plans to establish a new Jewish publishing house, theater, newspaper, and quarterly literary magazine. There were also plans to organize a countrywide conference of Jewish writers and cultural celebrities. It also noted that a commission for reviving the Jewish literature in Yiddish had been already established. In 1956, quote, many Jewish writers and journalists gathered in Moscow again, end quote. The Jewish activists later recall that, quote, the optimism inspired in all of us by the events in 1956 did not quickly

fade away, end quote. Yet the Soviet government continued with its meaningless and aimless policies discouraging any development of an independent Jewish culture. It is likely that Khrushchev himself was strongly opposed to it. Remember, Khrushchev comes from Ukrainian. There were very few for the dictators of the USSR. Only one was actually Russian. And that was Gorbachev, Brezhnev, was Ukrainian, Stalin was Georgia, and Khrushchev was Ukrainian. He comes from a peasant background, and maybe some of that was instilled in him. But it wasn't from any ideological point of view. He was concerned with, you know, with his own power, with his own faction.

You know, he was, I don't want to say he was ignorant, but you have plenty of people in the Soviet Union who thought he was. He just was impulsive. He tended not to know things. He tended to make wild predictions, you know, the stuff he did with Nixon. He just, you never knew. Never knew with him. He was entertaining. But eventually, this kind of thing is what led to his overthrow in 64. Correct me if I'm wrong. I'm reading these last few paragraphs. And it seems to me that they're not upset that they're being prevented from starting a Jewish literary magazine. They're upset that it's not being financed by the government and it's not being endorsed by the government. That's exactly right.

There was nothing in the way of them doing all this. These things existed anyway. The anti-fascist committee, yes, was dissolved. There was really no need for it anymore after fascism was gone from Europe. But, yeah, all of this stuff happened. They had the money, whether from the Soviet Union or elsewhere, but they wanted this to be a part of the Soviet budget. You're exactly right.

You know, Solomon Schwartz, you know, he split with the Soviet Union because, I think I mentioned this already, but he was upset because there wasn't a specific amendment to the Constitution that referred to Jews. I'm not into the Constitution saying any anti-Semitic statement or idea is banned. There was all kinds of statements against ethnic antagonism and all that, but because it was not specifically one for Jews, he had all upset. You know, these people had tremendous power. And the neocons later on would say the Solomons were great, man, he split with the USSR.

But that was the only reason. it wasn't Jewish enough for him. So, yes, all of these things occurred. They had plenty of money for it. This was a renaissance of Jewish power. But they think that they were oppressed because they didn't get money from the state to do it. And then came new developments,

the Suez crisis where Israel, Britain, and France allied in attacking Egypt. Israel is heading to suicide, formidably warned the Soviet press, and the Hungarian uprising with its anti-Jewish streak nearly completely concealed by history, resulting perhaps from the over-representations of Jews and the Hungarian KGB, could this be also one of the reasons, even if a minor one, for the complete absence of Western support for the rebellion?

Of course, at this time, the West was preoccupied with the Suez crisis, and yet wasn't it a signal to the Soviets suggesting that it would be better if the Jewish theme be kept hushed? Yeah, the Jewish representation in Hungary, even prior to its takeover after World War II in the very brief Red Republic and the Red Terror, it was immensely Jewish. Rokosi was the head of the party and their secret police, hardcore, 100% Stalinist. You know, he was like, he was like a stereotype, was Jewish. and so were all the people around them. So when there was an uprising in 56, yeah, there was to some extent, maybe not officially, but it was interpreted, especially in the West, as an anti-Semitic movement.

But without admitting that it was a completely Jewish government in the first place, I mean, the people who revolted against Vrakosi and others, they were counting in Marxist terms. They didn't want to become capitalist or anything. So it's shocking. Look at what the U.S. does today in Ukraine. But the utter refusal to support the rebels in Czechoslovakia and Hungary. You know, this is something to, it's remarkable.

When the enemy is, alleged enemy is leftist, no problem. When it's nationalist of some kind or another, then they'll spare no expense. And that's been driving me insane to this whole thing started. Then, a year later, Khrushchev finally overpowered his highly placed enemies within the party, and among others, Kaganovich was cast down. Could it really be such a big deal? The latter was not the only one. ousted, and even then, he was not the principal figure among the dethroned, and he was definitely

not thrown out because of his Jewishness. Yet, from the Jewish point of view, his departure symbolized the end of an era. Some looked around and counted, quote, the Jews disappeared not only from the ruling sections of the party, but also from the leading governmental circles. Yeah, you'd have to be completely ignorant to believe that. Big names like Kaganovits were so close to Salon. Kaganavits, one of the greatest mass murderers of all history. Very, you know, obviously with a name like Kagan, Kagan, Kagan. You know, he was a hardcore Khazar.

But because the big names were either retiring or getting pushed out, therefore Jews were oppressed. You know, they would interpret, and again, even the Western liberal circles would say the same thing. they would interpret anything like this as suddenly the Soviet Union has taken a turn for for anti-Semitism. It's this illogic, this special pleading from otherwise intelligent people is shocking. And it's still shocking, even though I've come across it a million times. I still can't get over it.

It was time to pause and ponder thoroughly. What did the Jews really think about such new authorities? David Berg, who emigrated from the USSR in 1956, came upon a formula on how the Jews should treat the Soviet rule. It proved quite useful for the authorities. To some, the danger of anti-Semitism from below seems greater than the danger of anti-Semitism from above. Though the government oppresses us,

it nevertheless allows us to exist. If, however, a revolutionary change comes, then during the inevitable anarchy of the transition period, we will simply be exterminated. Therefore, let's hold on to the government no matter how bad it is. I, you know, this is, it's, you know, it's rare. It's very rare when I'm at a loss for words. But, but this kind of neurotic exaggeration.

And it's really a persecution complex. That it says essentially if they don't dominate the state, then they're oppressed by it. And this is happening at a time. time where the Orthodox Church is being, you know, what was left of it was being slaughtered and sent to the camps even worse than before. And of course, Jews were at the center of that from top, you know, always. They always had a hand, a strong hand in the police organs, one way or another. And that's really how the, that was a formula.

If we don't run it, then it's against us. Then it oppresses us. even though there were Jewish names everywhere throughout the system. Now, again, starting in the 70s, by the mid-70s, there was a bit of an issue there, and you had some immigration. Jews wanted to leave the country. You go to Israel. That's a separate issue, but right now there wasn't the case. And that's why this chapter is called before the Six Day War, because that's going to cause a lot of problems and tensions between Jews and the Soviet government, because the Soviet government was very much in favor of the Arabian.

and supporting them with weaponry and everything, advisors and everything they could do, everything they could give. And so that choice was a little strange, especially when the Jews were winning over there with American money, among other things. So this is just, you know, and of course they're going to support the communist government.

The laws were still in the books that anti-Semitism was to be prosecuted. those laws were not withdrawn. Those laws were not removed, and they were being enforced every single day at this time and every other time, practically until the day the Soviet Union dissolved. We repeatedly encountered similar concerns in the 1930s that the Jews should support the Bolshevik power in the USSR because without it, their fate would be even worse. And now, even though the Soviet power had further deteriorated, the Jews had no other choice but to hold the war. on, but hold on to it as before. The Western world, in particular the United States, always heeded such recommendations

even during the most strained years of the Cold War. In addition, Soviet socialist Israel was still full of communist sympathizers and could forgive the Soviet Union a lot for its role in the defeat of Hitler. Yet now, yet how then could Soviet anti-Semitism be interpreted? In this aspect, the recommendation. of D. Berg stood up to the acute social demand to move emphasis from the anti-Semitism of the Soviet government to the anti-Semitism of the Russian people, that ever-present curse. The Jews at least were self-aware enough to know that their dominance in the police departments

and the police units throughout the Soviet Union, their slaughter of the Orthodox. There's slaughter of some Catholics in Poland and later on, of course, in Poland and Ukraine, that they were in control of this, that if the average Soviet citizen was given a choice, they would throw every Jew out. So what choice do they really have? There was no Soviet anti-Semitism at any point whatsoever. We've mentioned this a thousand times because Jews were so dominant, any time there's a shake-up,

Jews are going to be moved out. That doesn't make it anti-Semitic. It just means that the Jews were very dominant to begin with. And it's really the mentality here. From people who are considered highly intelligent, I guess this is what happens when you only think in terms of yourself this sense that you are the center of the world

and the lives of others, including those who are being slothed, ordered at the time don't mean anything. And it's the very fact that the Western Party were coming over asking about the Jews, it means that they themselves

were heavily dominated by Jews. And then within a decade, maybe a little bit more, the U.S. government was condemning the Soviet Union for anti-Semitism. And we'll talk about the Jackson-Vatic Amendment at some point. But the one and only time,

the sanctions were placed on the Soviet Union was concerning the treatment of the Jews if they wouldn't let them leave for Israel. The slaughter of orthodox, no problem. Totalitarianism, no problem. Instruction of their economy, no problem. The absorption and torture of people in Eastern Europe, no problem.

But the minute you tell the Jews what to do, big problem. And so you have the Western Communist Party in the U.S. government working together within a decade, and this is where it started. So now some Jews have even fondly recalled the long-dispended Yevsek, the Jewish section of the Central Committee dismantled in 1930 when Diemannstein and its other leaders were shot. Even though back in the 1920s, it seemed overly pro-communists, the Yevsec was, quote,

to a certain extent a guardian of Jewish national interests, an organ that produced some positive work as well. I want to point out that it was Jewish elites within the USSR that took the F.S. It was Jewish-Newish violence here. It wasn't, you know, Stalin or, you know, this was various people who took it apart. So these were factions now among Jews that they tried to cover over. Just keep that in mind. It wasn't anti-Semitism.

And even to the extent it was, it was Jews not wanting to have to deal with these groups anymore. Certainly when it came to Zionism, too. In the meantime, Khrushchev's policy remained equivocal. Equivocal. Equivocal. It is reasonable to assume that though Khrushchev himself did not like Jews, he did not want to fight against them, realizing the international political counterproductive counterproductive of such an effort.

In 1957 to 58, Jewish musical performances and public literary clubs were authorized and appeared in many cities nationwide. For example, in 1961, Jewish literary soires and Jewish song performances were attended by about 300,000 people. Yet at the same time, the circulation of Warsaw's Volksstim was discontinued in the Soviet Union, thus cutting the Soviet Jews off from an outside source of Jewish information. In 1954, after a long break, Shalom Alecum's The Adventures of Model was again published in Russian, followed by several editions of his other books and their translations into other languages. In 1959, a large edition of his collected works was published as well.

In 1961 in Moscow, the Yiddish magazine, Sovitech Heimland, was established, though it strictly followed the official policy line. Publications of books by Jewish authors, who were executed in Stalin's times, were resumed in Yiddish and Russian, and one even could hear Jewish tunes on the broadcast of the All-Soviet Union radio. By 1966, quote, about 100 Jewish authors were writing in Yiddish in the Soviet Union, and almost all the named authors simultaneously worked as Russian language journalists and translators, and many of them worked as teachers in the Russian schools, end quote. However, the Jewish theater did not reopen until 1966.

In 1966, as Schwartz defined the Jewish situation in the U.S. USSR as cultural orphanhood. Yet another author bitterly remarks, quote, the general lack of enthusiasm and interests from the wider Jewish population toward those cultural undertakings cannot be explained solely by official policies. With rare exceptions during those years, the Jewish actors performed in half-empty halls. Books of Jewish writers were not selling well, end quote. Well, I suppose they were fully assimilated in this case.

Could they possibly have seen the Soviet Union, especially after World War, too as their as their savior um i don't know who um solemn alaqheim is i've never come across him before i've heard his name but i've never read anything there uh but the fact that jews weren't all that interested in these very specifically jewish programs and things even though that they were everywhere um some were supported by the budget and some were not um tells you something i don't know what Orphanhood means. So it's going to be up to the Jews in the U.S. to then it's going to be up to the Jews in the U.S. to kind of kickstart that.

And so they were concerned. Now the population of Jews in the USSR was going down this period of time. Overwhelmingly, the majority of those going to Israel were from Russia, or the Russian Empire, or the Soviet Empire, I should say. talk about a group of people who had no connection with the Israelites, totally alien people claiming that they're the heirs of the Old Testament, or as of course, you can't get any more absurd than that. But, you know, the most important thing to keep in mind,

there was never any specific anti-Jewish movement here. Never. It just affected them disproportionately because they were so dominant to begin with. Similarly, ambivalent, but more hostile policies of the Soviet authorities in Khrushchev's period were implemented against the Jewish religion. It was a part of Khrushchev's general anti-religious assault. It is well known how devastating it was for the Russian Orthodox Church. Since the 1930s, not a single theological school functioned in the USSR.

In 1957, a yeshiva, a school for training rabbis, opened in Moscow. It accommodated only 35 students, and even those were, being consistently pushed out under various pretexts, such as withdrawal of residence registration in Moscow. Printing of prayer books and manufacturing of religious accessories was hindered. Up to 1956, before the Jewish Passover matza was baked by state-owned bakeries and then sold in stores. Beginning in 1957, however, baking of matzo was obstructed, and since 1961, it was banned outright, almost everywhere. I find that hard to believe. Yeah, it wasn't banned. It just wasn't finance. It wasn't subsidized. Yeah.

One day the authorities would not interfere with receiving parcels with Mata from abroad. Another day, they stopped the parcels at the customs and even demanded recipients to express in the press their outrage against the senders. In many places, synagogues were closed down. Quote, in 1966, only 62 synagogues were functioning in the entire Soviet Union. end quote. Yet the authorities did not dare to shut down the synagogues in Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, and the capitals of the republics. In the 1960s, there used to be extensive worship services on holidays, with large crowds of 10 to 15,000 on the streets around synagogues. C. Schwartz notes that in the 1960s Jewish religious life was in severe decline,

and yet he large-minded reminds us that it was the result of the long process of secularization that began in Russian Jewry in the late 19th century. The process, which he adds, has also succeeded in extremely non-communist Poland between the First and Second World Wars. Judaism and the Soviet Union lacked a United Control Center, Yet when the Soviet authorities wanted to squeeze out a political show from the leading rabbis for foreign policy purposes, be it about the well-being of Judaism in the USSR, outraged against the nuclear war, the government was perfectly able to stage it. The Soviet authorities had repeatedly used Jewish religious leaders for foreign policy goals. For example, in November 1956, a group of rabbis issued a protest against the actions of Israel during the Suez War.

So you have a situation where you had a very small official Russian Orthodox Church established by Stalin in 44, a handful of parishes. They had to support, I mean, I can't imagine being in their position. It was either that of the camps. So having to treat the USSR as the leader, the Christian leaders of the world. They said that about Stalin. that he, in his victory over Hitler, reestablished Christianity over the world. They've said that many times. No way they could have believed it themselves.

But you have, they didn't have many parishes and very few schools or anything else. A tiny handful. Overwhelmingly, the church was either underground, was very large, as I mentioned before, very large underground church, all believers as well. or they went abroad in huge numbers. You know, and the Russian synod abroad was a large institution in and of itself. And yet here you have functional Moscow synagogues with people worshipping in public and lined up around the corner. And I think the only real issue was they had to do everything in Yiddish.

I think the only time a synagogue was shut down if they wanted to do, Hebrew. If it wanted to use Hebrew, and keep in mind, that was the official language of Israel, the state of Israel. It was almost a dead language until the Israeli government decided this is going to be our language. Of course, people who, these Russian migrants had no connection with the Hebrew language whatsoever, but it became the official and was revived again. but that was pretty much the only issue. So you consider the treatment of the two sides and you realize who really ran things.

That the power that the Jews had was just so ordinary. You know, state-run bakeries. I can't, you know, the power that they had was so great that the tiniest little bit, you know, if the buzzet was cut a little bit, This is it. It's another Shoah. And they actually acted that way. And Jews in the U.S., in Britain, would second them on that.

And it's very true. Actually, probably the reason for this tiny Orthodox church that Stalin created was to make statements like this against the U.S. policy in Korea or Vietnam. And they used rabbis, too, when it came to Israel during the Suez Mor. And, of course, you had plenty of orthodox rabbis around the world who didn't like Israel in the first place. So maybe that wasn't too difficult to do. So regardless of who was running the USSR,

religious leaders were there functionally, and they'll be tolerated somewhat if they follow the Soviet line completely. and can be used in places like the World Council of Churches, which is very much dominated by the Soviet Orthodox Church, was just an embarrassment at the time. The consolation, though, of course, is that millions and millions of Orthodox people lived either underground or abroad

and represented what the true Orthodox Church truly was. And it was just very, it was very cringy to hear or read how they spoke about, you know, Stalin and Khrushchev as these great Christian leaders. It, but they had no choice. And they had to say this from the pulpit. They weren't allowed to talk about anything political except for that. But you go through the Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate.

It exists, I'm pretty sure it exists only in Russian. But in this era, you read that you read these things and you just, you know, I feel bad for these guys. you know, saying these things were outrageous lies, the complete opposite of the truth. And I don't really want to judge them too much because they knew it was going to happen if they didn't do it. They knew where they were going to go. You have some people so stupid, they believe that desoloneization in the Crusoev era meant that camps were shut down. No way. They were increased. Their percentage in their production.

their percentage in the Soviet economy grew. They weren't shut down. You have people who believe that. They really weren't shut down until the early 80s, maybe the mid-80s. The Soviets couldn't shut their camps down because they were simply too important. Economically speaking, slave labor was great for them. It may have been inefficient, but whatever was lacking in the Soviet economy, the slaves could make up for.

And not just in menial labor, but also in scientific labor, too, as we've talked about before as well. But that's what Israel really was. I'm sorry, that's what religion really was in the Soviet Union, especially in this period of time. If you serve Soviet foreign policy goals will let you exist, and if you say stupid things, like we're the greatest Christian or protector of the Jews, whatever you want to call them, you know, we'll let you live. That was pretty much how it was. Another factor which aggravated the status of Judaism in the USSR after the Suez War

was the growing fashionability of what was termed the struggle against Zionism. Zionism being strictly speaking a form of socialism should naturally have been seen as a true brother to the party of Marx and Lenin. Yet after the bid 1950s, the decision to secure the friendship of the Arabs drove the Soviet leaders towards persecution of Zionism. However, for the Soviet masses, Zionism was a distant, unfamiliar, and abstract phenomenon. Therefore, to flesh out this struggle, to give it a distinct embodiment, the Soviet government presented Zionism as a caricature composed of the characteristic and eternal Jewish images.

The books and pamphlets allegedly aimed against Zionism also contained explicitly anti-Judaic and anti-Jewish messages. If in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s, Judaism was not as brutally persecuted as the Russian Orthodox Church, that in 1957, a foreign socialist commentator noted how that year signified, quote, a decisive intensification of the struggle against Judaism, the turning point in the struggle against the Jewish religion, and that the character of the struggle betrays that it is directed not only against Judaism, but against the Jews in general. End quote.

There was one starring episode. In 1963 in Kiev, the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences published, 12,000 copies of a brochure, unadorned Judaism in Ukrainian, yet it was filled with such blatant anti-Jewish caricatures that it provoked a large-scale international outcry joined even by the communist friends who were financially supported by Moscow, such as the leaders of the American and British Communist parties, newspapers La Humanaita, as well as pro-Chinese communist newspapers from Brussels and many others. The UN Human Rights Commission demanded an explanation, from its Ukrainian representative.

The World Jewish Cultural Association called for the prosecution of the author and the cartoonist. The Soviet side held on for a while, insisting that except for the drawings, the book deserves a generally positive assessment. Finally, even Pravda had to admit that it was indeed an ill-prepared brochure with erroneous statements and illustrations

that may offend feelings of religious people or be interpreted as anti-Semitic. A phenomenon that, as is universally known, does not and cannot exist in our country. Yet at the same time as Vestia stated that although there were certain drawbacks to the brochure, its main idea is no doubt, right. There were even several arrests of religious Jews from Moscow and Leningrad, accused of espionage conversations during personal meetings and synagogues,

for a capitalistic state, Israel, which synagogues allegedly used as fronts for very various criminal activities to scare others more effectively. One of the huge cracks that developed in Soviet life was the foundation of the state of Israel. The fact that it did exist, that it won its wars with usually American money and American funds, and that a standard of living as time went on was probably better than the Soviet, which was not lost on many Jews, there was a recoil against Zionism. You had millions of communists, Soviet Jews that had rejected Zionism entirely.

It's nationalist. It's fascist. It's, you know, it's genocidal. But I think what Schultzni's trying to get at here is that since most of the Hess was one of the great founders of Judeaic Marxism, trying to connect Zionism and socialism. He was a tremendous influence on Marx, far more than what we understood. And they were pretty much contemporaries, too. I've read Hess to agree, he's not very accessible, but when you get him, you really understand what he was trying to do. But if that's not the way

that Zionism was being developed here, We've talked about Zionism in all these other shows, largely as an abstraction. But now there's a state of Israel that is winning its wars, that is doing very well. It has the U.S. government in Palm of its hand in Western Europe too, has a relatively high standard of living. That is Hebrew as its official language. So obviously, you know, the Soviet government has to make a choice. It can't, the economy couldn't make the deal that the U.S. economy could. Soviet military hardwill is probably better at the time than American, but I think it's still the case now.

But in terms of financial success and everything else, you know, the more, the more, the more wars that the Israelis won, there was a certain pride. You know, Jews were finally had a state of their own. And, of course, anti-Zionist Jews in the Soviet Union was, this is our state. This is our promised land. Of course, I've always thought that New York was their promised land. And then you have the additional problem of the Crimean Socialist Republic,

which never took place. The so-called New Kuzon. Saudi, which still probably can never take place now, so long as Putin is alive. This was one of the major, major fractures that developed in the Soviet Union. And once the Jews kind of had enough of this, huge flood of them went to Israel or the U.S. or both. And what was left was your, you know, half-S.-S.-half-Soviet, half-Russian nationalist types. This is where Putin came out of. Putin came out of the

that same era where the Jews had pretty much left the USSR, the Soviet patriotic era, you know, even though Andropov was a Jew ahead of the KGB.

But there was a huge, I can't exaggerate the chasm here. And whatever the Jews were divided, the USSR was in trouble. Beyond that, the standard of living, whether it be West Germany or the U.S. or Israel itself, it can't be ignored. It was better than the USSR. The Jews know where the money is.

And in my work on this topic, I've said, and I've quoted many others, saying Jews are aware where the economic future is going to be, the future, where money is going to be made. By the 60s, early 70s, the rebuilding of the USSR, that capital after World War II was already starting to age. The profit wasn't there, if whatever was there. And this chasm was massive. And so they really were very much concerned with leaving the country, which the Soviets tried to stop. Again, this was never anti-Semitic. It was violently anti-Zionism at a certain point. And this is the reason why.

All right. We will pick up on the, we'll continue this chapter on the next episode, episode 110, which happens to be my wedding anniversary because my wife wanted a number that I would remember. Okay. Yeah. And I want to remind everybody, as I always do, go over to the show notes and go over to the description of the videos and support Dr. Johnson's work by his new book. and, yeah, show them that you appreciate everything that's being done here. It's kind of hard to, I'm starting to realize that this is going to be over soon. Yeah, it's frightening, you know. It's, what am I going to do? What am I going to do on Wednesdays and Saturdays?

Well, there's going to be another book. Okay. And maybe we're open to suggestions. from readers. I have a few ideas. Maybe readers may have a few ideas. So there's going to be a new book. We're to continue this just for our own mental health because we couldn't do it. We'd be, we'd go batty. Wednesdays and Saturdays would be depressed and everything else.

So, yes. And anyway, I appreciate all of that. I appreciate your help. This has been a wonderful experience, especially given this episode 109. that makes it all the more exciting. Is that a special number or something? No, it is not, just for some reason, I must be in a good mood today. That must be it.

You know, nothing special at that number whatsoever, but it's just something that strikes me as interesting. And especially since this whole thing has been, is, you know, are we getting to the point where, you know, right now, what is Jewish percentage of the population, of Russia is 0.5%. It's tiny. And we're coming to the era for the reasons

for that. It wasn't that way. In Zaris, Russia, in the beginning of the Soviet Union, it was much larger than that. Now, it's almost minuscule. So, but no, 109 has no particular, there was a Mercer-Smith

model, ME-109, I think. Maybe that's what it's thinking about. I think maybe that's does it. Yeah. So, I don't know, I'd be subconscious. I have no idea. I will talk to you on Saturday. Thank you, Dr. Johnson. All right, man. Talk to you then. Bye-bye. I want to welcome everyone back to our reading of 200 years together by Alexander Solzhenycin. This is episode number 110. Dr. Johnson, how are you doing today? Well, you know, on my show, the Orthodox Nationalist, I don't have guests. It just means very, very no frills.

is just me lecturing on a topic like you're taking a university course. But today I am joined with Marcel, who is two inches from the mic, and Stanley, who is in his bed sleeping. He is out like a light. I could hear him snoring. So if they have anything to say, I will let you know. And I'm eager to hear what they have to say. They're not stupid. All right, picking up where we left off last time.

Although there were already no longer any Jews in the most prominent positions, many still occupied influential and important second-tier posts, though there were exceptions. For example, Veniamen Dimshitz smoothly ran Goss Plan, the state planning committee, from 1962, while being at the same time the deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers of USSR and a member of the Central Committee from 1961 to 1986. Why at one time the Jews were joining NKVD and the MVD in such numbers that even now, after all purges of the very Jewish spirit, a few individuals miraculously survived, such as the famous Captain Jaffa in a camp in Mordovia. Well, let's assume that that's true. You have Dim Shits, which, again, a great name.

He runs the state planning committee, and he's deputy chairman of the council of ministers. Well, that's pretty much the power of the USSR, the economic and the political power. Why do you need anyone else? Those are two incredibly powerful positions. And being a member of the council or the committee, in 61 to 86, that's a long time.

But remember, you know, I don't think that there was ever a Jewish purge at least at the time we're talking about roughly after the death of Stalin I think that's the era we're dealing with here or maybe the end of his rule so we're talking about right up to not quite crucial yet but but dim shits now despite the name everyone should know it because that's pretty that's a huge amount of power in one man's hands the state planning committee and the deputy chairman of the council of ministers.

That's an extraordinary. I just, that's huge in one man's, uh, one man's hand. So clearly this was not an anti-Jewish purge. They were everywhere beforehand and there were everywhere afterwards. According to the USSR census of 1959, 2.268,2,268,000 Jews lived in the Soviet Union. yet there were caveats regarding this figure. Quote, everybody knows that there are more Jews in the Soviet Union than the census showed, end quote. As on the census day, a Jew states his nationality not according to his passport, but any nationality he wishes.

Of those 2,162,000 Jews lived in the cities, i.e. 95.3% of the total population, much more than 82% in 1926 or 87% in 1939. And if we glance forward into the 1970s census, the observed increase in the number of Jews in Moscow and Leningrad is apparently caused not by natural growth, but by migration from several other cities in spite of all the residential restrictions. Over these 11 years, at least several thousand Jews relocated to Kiev, the concentration of Jews in large cities had been increasingly increasing for many decades. Well, clearly there were no residential restrictions. Jews were able to go wherever they wanted.

Of course, they're in urban people. And we've been almost from the first day, we've been talking about how the Jews refused to answer census, whether it be in the Tsar's period, going way back, they want to keep their numbers secret. and there's obviously a reason for that, they functioned as a mafia group, more or less. Things changed when the Soviets took over. It was to a great extent of Jewish movement or a movement in the Jewish spirit.

But Israel, the foundation of Israel and the dual loyalties then started to cause some problems. That doesn't mean that there were ever any purges specifically of Jews and any, And even if they were, it would have to be carried out by other Jews. So that number, I just as an aside, is much lower now. And those, let's say 20% in 1926, they were involved in tavern keeping. We talked about this already, in tavern keeping and making alcohol in that to get the goyam drunk. But that wasn't as relevant anymore. So Moscow, Kiev, that were their two big areas.

That's where the power was. That's where the money was. And even after the Jews disengaged from the USSR in the early 70s, they still had a large presence in those two cities. These figures are very telling for those who know about the differences in living standards between the urban and the rural populations in the Soviet Union. G. Rosenblum, the editor of the prominent Israeli newspaper Yaddeoth Aronoth, recalls an almost anecdotal story by Israeli ambassador to Moscow, Dr. Harrell, about his tour of the USSR in the mid-1960s. In a large Caucasus near Kishnev, he was told that, quote,

The Jews who work here want to meet him. The Israeli was very happy that there were Jews in the Kulkos, love of agriculture, a good sign for Israel. He recounts, quote, three Jews came to meet me. One was a cashier. Another editor of the Colcoss's wall newspaper and the third one was a kind of economic manager. I couldn't find any other. So what the Jews used to do before, they are still doing. G. Rosenblum confirms to this, quote, indeed, the Soviet Jews and their masses did not take to the physical work. End quote.

El Shapiro concludes, quote, conversion of Jews to agriculture ended in failure despite all the efforts of public Jewish organizations and the assistance of the state. How many times have we dealt with this since we've done 110 shows, hundreds of attempts, one more stupid than the next. But you would think at least the Soviet Union

they would identify with it. But as it turns out, that just became a part of their mentality. And even in Israel, yeah, the Klobutz, they use Arab labor. You know, their managers, that's what they do. They're superior. They don't work with their hands. That's for the Guillaume. And that's the future they have in store for all of us.

In Moscow, Leningrad, and Kiev, the city's enjoying the highest living in cultural standards in the country. The Jews, according to the 1959 census, constituted 3.9%, 5.8% in the city. 13.9% of the population, respectively, which is quite a lot, considering that they accounted for only 1.1% of the entire population of the USSR. So it was at this extremely high concentration of Jews in urban areas, 95% of all Soviet Jews lived in the cities, that made, quote, the system of prohibitions and restrictions, end quote, particularly painful for them. As we mentioned in the previous chapter, the system was outlined back in the early 1940s. And quote, Although the restrictive rules have never been officially acknowledged and officials stoutly denied their existence,

these rules and restrictions very effectively barred the Jews from many spheres of action, professions, and positions." Let's be clear. There were no laws saying this. There were no regulations saying this. This is your typical, you know, Solomon Swartz kind of hysteria. 1.1% of the population and you have you have even after purges you had massive concentrations of Jews in in very powerful

party and police structures not not anything like you know you have to work with your hands or you know in the army but but in everything else Jews are able to see anti-semitism in anything

and these rules were never written down. There was nothing like that. But there was a legitimate worry, at least in some elements of the party, that Israel is going to become, especially because it's now being supported by the U.S. with a huge amount of money, that Israel's now going to become far more of a home to Jews in the USSR. There were plenty of Stalinist Jews that were always, be there in Eastern Europe too, who I rejected Israel and this is our homeland. But there was always

a small Zionist group, also communists in every way. I mean, the Israeli state was based on more or less a Marxist program. We don't really talk about that very much. We're always talking about the military side of things and their crimes and everything else. But they took the collective farming system of the USSR and brought it to Israel to be worked by others, by Arabs. So let's be clear. There was no, no one ever, the system was very dependent upon Jews. And not just within the Soviet Union, but also outside of it. There was nothing written that said Jews can't do this, can't do that.

So let's be clear about that. There was no one out there who hated Jews, although we have to admit, maybe at the lower level of the party, as we said 100 times before from the beginning, that, you know, why are the Jews, you know, 1.1% of the population, why are they so privileged? We're supposed to be against that sort of thing, right? Again, after the death of Stalin, you have factions, and you have people who, if they ever had faith in the revolution, didn't have it anymore. Some recall disturbing rumor circulating then among the Jews. Allegedly, Khrushchev said in one of his unpublished speech,

teaches that as many Jews will be accepted into the institutions of higher education as work in the coal mines. Now, that's a good one. I like that. I like that. I don't doubt he actually wrote that. I don't doubt it either. He's, that's the sort of thing he would say, I'm surprised he didn't blurt it out just anywhere because that was his, personality. He got into a lot of trouble. But the line itself is wonderful. perhaps he really just blurted it out in his usual manner because such balancing was never carried out yet by the beginning of the 1960s while the absolute number of jewish students increased their relative share decreased substantially when compared to the pre-war period if in 1936 the share of jews among students was seven point five times higher than that in the total population then by the 1960s it was only two point seven times higher these new data on the distribution of students in higher and secondary education by nationality were published for the first time in the post-war period in 1963 in the statistical annual report, the national

economy of the USSR, and a similar table was annually produced up to 1972. In terms of the absolute number of students and institutions of higher education and technical schools in the 1962-63 academic year, Jews were fourth after the three Slavic nations, Russians, Ukrainians, violent Russians, with 79,300 Jewish students in institutions of higher education, out of a total 2,943,700 students, 2.69%. In the next academic year, 63 to 64, the number of Jewish students increased to 82,600, while the total number of students in the USSR reached 3,260,000.7%. In the number of students in the 700,000, 2.53%. This share remained almost constant until the 6970 academic year. 101,000 Jewish students out of a total of 4,549,900. Then the Jewish share began to decline, and in

1972 to 73, it was 1.91%, 85,88,500 Jewish students out of a total of 4,630,246.46. This decline coincided with the beginning of the Jewish immigration to Israel. Well, that last section in parentheses that said what I was going to say, there was always a slow drip of Jews leaving the USSR, either for the U.S. or Israel. That was just a matter, of course. But in the early 70s, the Jackson-Vannock Amendment, which I'm almost positive, he's going to talk about at some point it became more of a flood. And the same was the case for Eastern Europe.

In the paper that you've uploaded to your side, I go into great detail about that. Now, I've read the national economy of the USSR for my work dealing with that period of time, and it's very unreliable. The Soviets were notorious for that. They had every incentive to lie about production figures. So, you know, we take these. It sounds like exact numbers, but let's take these with a grain of salt. But they definitely give us a general idea of what the situation looked like.

But it wasn't just you had a certain percentage in schools. They were in the medical professions. They were in high-tech professions. So it wasn't just any old secondary and post-secondary school. They were in the power positions and, of course, all the economic positions as well. So this is a qualitative issue as well as a quantitative one. The relative number of Jewish scientists also declined in the 1960s, from 9.5% in 1960 to 6.1% in 1973. During those same years, quote, there were tens of thousands of Jewish names in the Soviet art

and literature, end quote, including 8.5% of writers and journalists, 7.7% of actors and artists, more than 10% of judges and attorneys, great, and about 15% doctors. Traditionally, there were always many Jews in medicine, yet considered the accursed Soviet psychiatry, which in those years began locking up healthy people in mental institutions. And who were those psychiatrists? listing the Jewish occupations, M. I. Haifitz writes, Psychiatry is a Jewish monopoly.

A friend, a Jewish psychiatrist, told me just before my arrest, we began to get Russians only recently and even then as the results of an order. He provides examples. The head psychiatrist of Leningrad, Professor Averk-Book, provides his expertise for the KGB in the big house. In Moscow, there was famous Luntz. In the Kaluga Hospital, there was Lifshitz and his Jewish gang. When Haifitz was arrested and his wife began looking for a lawyer with a clearance, that is, with the permission from the KGB to work on political cases,

she, quote, did not find a single Russian among them as all such lawyers were Jews. I thought there were these purges. I thought that, you know, there was these anti-Semitic restrictions. Well, clearly not. at least not in the fields that mattered most. Because I've been doing this for so long, and I'm so focused and specialized on this stuff. I, again, have another paper I need to send you. They did it on Soviet psychiatry and psychology, which was very different in the Western version.

It, especially under Khrushchev, Khrushchev made great use of it. it was the new way of dealing with dissidents. They did a lot of testing of different drugs on people. The highest ranking person was, of course, the great General Peter Gregooriev, who was eventually dumped off in America. He was a four-star general. And he said that there was an offensive build-up. on the border, the Central Europe's border, and that's why Hitler invaded, and that's why

no one expected it. It was basically on suicide, all the stuff that we say. The first thing they did was send him to a very distant command out in East Asia. He kept going. He kept talking about Stalin that way. Then they brought him to an institution, and he has a book out on it, the things that were done to him. He was never quite the same again.

but when you get into this is one thing that even Jewish psychiatrists in the U.S. were concerned about it hurt their image because they were using some very dangerous drugs and methods

all kinds of experiments the Soviets can get away with things that the Americans really couldn't gulag prisoners were often too valuable for their economy to connection to the economy but dissidents new dissidents now

now. It's great. You send him to these new things called mental institutions, and people bought it. People actually thought, oh my God, he must be sick. They came up with something called latent schizophrenia. In other words, it's asymptomatic. So they had asymptomatic schizophrenia. Well, he's, which just meant that if someone dissents and shows no sign of mental illness, That's what he was, the label he was given. And people went, oh, the psychiatrists are saying that. It must be true. It's asymptomatic. He didn't show any signs of it, but he probably will in the future. And because of his dissent. How can you possibly dissent from the workers' paradise?

You know, we live in advanced communism here. How can you possibly dissent? So this was, that was inherent. That was by itself a sign of mental illness. And it was a very nasty part of social. Soviet history, starting roughly about now, it reached this peak in the Khrushchev era, though. And I will send that to you. Maybe we'll talk about it a little bit more. I don't know if he's going to talk about it more. But I have a lengthy paper on that. I'm quite proud of. And it gets

really tough to read sometimes. They were very nasty to these people. Grigorenko, because of his high rank, they went a little bit too far. They couldn't kill him. That would have been a terrible idea. So he went to America. And typically, you know, he didn't get much traction here. You would think someone like that, well, pretty much a defector. People would still be talking about today. Well, most people even know who he was. He's a four-star general saying everything that we say about, you know, the reasons for Hitler's invasion is true. And that's why, you know, he had so many men at the border. That's why we lost so many soldiers. that people would be talking about him.

He is one of the big pieces of evidence for the icebreaker thesis. You can't really deny it anymore. But of course, he was flushed down the memory hole if he was even in the memory hole. But he does have a book, which I've read on Soviet psychological practices. He was subject to it. You know, he says in there, he says, you know, one day when I was released, I couldn't get a job anymore and I was with my wife selling vegetables

on the side of the road he goes from four star general to selling vegetables to the side of the road in far eastern Russia and he said you know for the first time of my life I'm free because now I don't have to listen to anybody anymore

for the first time of my life I was free selling vegetables on the side of the road member of the party four star general I was under very under very short leave Of course, he was not a Jew either. Griegerenko, clearly a Gentile, a Ukrainian name. And he has a lot of great lines in his book there. And we're going to talk about it in the future.

But I will send you my paper on Soviet psychiatry. Part of it concerns his work, too. In 1956, Fertseva, then the first secretary of Moscow, Gorkom, the city's party committee, complained that in some offices, Jews constitute more than half of the staff. I have to note for balance that in those years, the presence of Jews in the Soviet apparatus was not detrimental. The Soviet legal machinery was in its essence, stubbornly and hard-heartedly anti-human, skewed against any man in need, be it a petitioner or just a visitor.

So it often happened that the Russian officials and Soviet offices, petrified by their power, looks for any excuse to triumphantly turn away a visitor. In contrast, one could find much more understanding in a Jewish official and resolve an issue in a more humane way. El Shapiro provides examples of complaints that in the National Republics, the Jews were pushed out and displaced from the bureaucratic apparatus by native intelligentsia. Yet it was a common and officially mandated system of preferences in the ethnic republics to affirm the local cadres, and Russians were displaced just as well. Yeah, one of the big problems, one of the big worries from Stalphiol.

era, especially when Stalin died, was pissing off the outer rim of republics. As I mentioned last time, some of them were quite productive. Georgia and Armenia were particularly productive. Every republic had a specific part within the Soviet economic system, which meant that when they were independent, they had an economy that now didn't make any sense. It only worked within the larger system. And you had a lot of high-tech stuff done in Georgia and Armenia. And since they tended to meet or exceed their quotas, they were kind of left alone. They didn't want to, they didn't want to piss these people off. Creating a secessionist movement would be a disaster. And we know that was part of the part of what brought the system down. So Native

congeys were able to get away with this kind of thing, pushing out. Jews and Russians. But this was at the, especially Russians, and these men in these positions were all educated in Russia, in Moscow or in Leningrad. I've been through, I've got to have a paper on this too, where I deal with the cost and benefit for the average citizen in each republic, Russia included. and most take more than they give. The only exception to that was Russia. So it was clearly exploited. So these people would use Russian resources and go back to the republic and then build it.

And that's why Russian nationalism was so violently repressed. And it always was a problem. Russian nationalism was feared most of all. but some of these republics, especially in the Baltics, you always had, you always had Scandinavian interest in them, especially Estonia. They were in the Soviet Union by force, starting in 1940. So they were allowed to get away with this stuff more so than in the central regions, is the point I'm trying to make here.

And getting rid of Russians also was a very important thing, despite the fact that Russia as a suffering republic within the USSR had financed everything. Their university systems, it all came from, Russia was exploited so these other places can thrive, or as much as you could thrive in the Soviet system. This reminds me of an example from contemporary American life. In 1965, the New York Division of the American Jewish Committee had conducted a four months long, unofficial interview of more than a thousand top officials in New York City banks. based on its results, the American Jewish Committee mounted a protest because less than 3% of those surveyed were Jews,

though they constituted one quarter of the population of, that is, the committee demanded proportional representation. Then the chairman of the Association of Banks in New York responded that banks, according to law, do not hire on the basis of race, creed, color, or national origin, and do not keep records of such categories. that would be our accursed fifth article, the requirement in the Soviet internal passport, nationality. Interestingly, the same American Jewish committee had conducted a similar study about the ethnic composition of management of the 50 largest U.S. public utility services two years before, and in 1964, in similar vein,

it studied industrial enterprises in the Philadelphia region. I have a list of your major, movers and shakers in American finance. Not just banks, but also hedge funds and all the rest. And it's single spaced. It's 25 pages long. I refuse to believe that it was actually 3%. I don't know who they surveyed or why or how they did this,

but it's almost like they were inventing an issue. The Harvard people did the same thing there. You know, they're like 10% of the, there's still not enough Jews. There are not enough Jews in the student newspaper, even though they dominated it totally. They're inventing an issue here to get upset about. They need more Jews in the banking industry, really? You think that's actually the case? So I think that this is just something that they invented.

I refuse to believe, even at this point, that 3% is the proper number. Yet, let us return to the Soviet Jews. Many Jewish immigrants loudly advertised their former activity in the periodical publishing and filmmaking industries back in the USSR. In particular, we learned from a Jewish author that it was due to Sarkomsky's support that all top positions in Literaturnia Gazeta became occupied by Jews. Yet 20 years later, we read a different assessment at the time. Well, the new anti-Semitism grew stronger, and by the second half of the 1960s, it already amounted to a developed system of discreditation, humiliation, and isolation of the entire people.

So how can we reconcile such conflicting views? How can we reach a calm and balanced assessment? This is like maybe the 10th or 15th time this has come up in our talk on the Soviet era, that there is an alleged purge of Jews from something and then two paragraphs later he says they completely dominated that very place how can they have been a purge

maybe reshuffling maybe but you know they dominated all these important areas as we've mentioned then we hear about these purges anti-Semitic purges that are outrageous and then right afterwards they still dominate these areas

so what kind of How much can these be? You know, this whole book since we started in the Soviet era, seems to be like that. At least the Stalinist era and now post-Tolomest era seems to be like that. And this is not the first time this has come up. Then from the high spheres inhabited by economic barons, there came alarming signals, signals that made the Jews nervous. Quote, to a certain extent, Jewish activity in the Soviet Union concentrated in the specific fields of economy along a characteristic pattern. well known to Jewish sociologists. End quote. By then, at the end of the 1950s, Khrushchev suddenly realized that the key spheres of the Soviet economy

are plagued by rampant theft and fraud. Quote, in 1961, an explicitly anti-Semitic campaign was initiated against the theft of socialist property. End quote. Beginning in 1961, a number of punitive decrees of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR were passed. The first one dealt with, quote, foreign currency speculations, end quote, another with bribes, and still another, later introduced capital punishment for the aforementioned crimes, at the same time, lawlessly applying the death penalty retroactively for the crimes committed

before those decrees were issued, as, for example, the case of J. Rochatoff and B. Faye B. Shanko. Execution started in the very first year. During the first nine trials, 11 individuals were sentenced to death. Among them were perhaps six Jews. The Jewish Encyclopedia states it more specifically, quote, in 1961 through 64, 39 Jews were executed for economic crimes in the RSFSR and 79 in Ukraine and 43 Jews in other republics. In these trials, quote, the vast majority of defendants were Jews, end quote. The publicity was such that the court records indicating the names and patron patronymics of the defendants, which were the normal order of pleadings, yet it was getting absolutely clear from that that they were Jews. That's interesting. What he says there is that they

weren't giving last names. In giving last names, they'd be, you know, admitting that these were Jews, but you could tell otherwise. Patronymics like Avaramovich or something like that, clearly are Jewish. So they were not using last name for the Jewish point of it, for very good reason. But like I said last time, we're now under Krusteves, things are starting to fall apart. Foreign currency speculation? And that, of course, is classic Jewish area, 100%. I think these were symbolic trials.

but if you're opposed to foreign currency speculations, you want to make an example of them, well, there were no non-Jews involved in that. So every name, of course, is going to be Jewish. Remember, Khrushchev personally comes from peasant stock in Ukraine, eastern Ukraine. And with this kind of thing, though, he was pissing a lot of people off. He wasn't going to last too much longer. He was overthrown in 64.

This was part of the reason why. that, you know, it was very clear. Now, the West is noticing this. The Western press is interpreting this as, and they have been, you know, in this era, that another mass purge of Jews, they would never say foreign currency speculations. They would say from the financial sphere or from banking or something like that. And a very powerful American and British Jewish organizations were starting to get upset with the Soviet system.

Certainly get upset with Khrushchev in particular, who, again, as I've said, is known for just kind of barting things out. Whatever in his head, he would say it. A lot of his innovations and policies were miserable failures. But technically, of course, any kind of speculation would be illegal. I know it occurred throughout the Soviet history, but now it's being exposed, and of course every single name is Jewish.

and the fact that they refused to use last name should tell you something. You know, and the fact that they executed them for economic crimes is also very interesting. And I guarantee you the lawyers and judges who put them in that position were Jews. Next, in a large court trial in Frunson, 1962, 19 out of 46 defendants were apparently Jewish. Quote, there is no reason to think that this new policy was conceived as a system. of anti-Jewish measures. Yet immediately upon enforcement, the new laws acquired distinct anti-Jewish flavor, end quote. The author of the quote obviously points out to the publication of the full names of defendants, including Jewish ones. Other than that, neither the courts nor the

government nor the media made any generalizations or direct accusations against the Jews. And even when Sovetskaya Kyrgyzia wrote that, quote, they occupied different posts, but they were closely linked to each other, end quote, it never clarified the begged question. How were they linked? The newspaper treated this issue with silence, thus pushing the reader to the thought that the nucleus of the criminal organization was composed of the closely linked individuals, yet closely linked by what? By their Jewishness.

So the newspaper emphasized the Jews in this case, yet people can be closely linked by any illegal transaction, greed, swindling, or fraud. And amazingly, nobody argued that those individuals could be innocent, though they could have been innocent. Yet to name them was equal to Jew baiting. That was the complaint. This, again, is proof that they did function as a criminal organization, just like they did in Zaris, Russia. Zaris Russia was supposed to be, it was supposed to have solved the problem. It was supposed to be a Jewish homeland of sorts. but the Jews didn't accept it that way, especially now. Israel being founded, again, even though it was by the Soviets in 1948,

that only lasted a few years, ruined everything as far as the Soviets were concerned, because now you have powerful Jews everywhere. You have a state dedicated just for Jews, closely linked with the United States. you know, a huge problem that the Soviets had is if you had a high, high-ranking technician educated in Russia, a lot of money spent on him,

and he decides he's going to leave for Israel, well, he's going to take all of those secrets with him. This was starting to become a huge problem. That's actually what led to the some restrictions and that led to the Jackson-Vanic Amendment in the early 70s. And that amendment also proves that Western elites, Jewish or not, were noticing this. So the Gulag state, no problem.

Mass murder, no problem. Fomenting revolution all over the world, no problem. But restricting Jews from immigration, now we're going to put sanctions on you. That's the problem. and all it was was using last names. Patronymus could be just as bad. You know, Moiseevich, classic Jewish patronymic, you know, your father's name. And they're talking about, you know, using vague connections.

We use this in American media today, linked or connected to. What does that mean? It's almost like they're coming out and saying that this is a mafia organization. you know, you had, you had plenty of people from, I keep using those examples because I know them, from Georgia or Armenia, that were doing very well in the USSR. Never had these kind of problems. Never had these kind of problems. And it's because of how they were linked. They were linked by race and an agenda. And the only thing that Soviets had going for them was that Jews were very, very, very. heavily divided between the minority who thought that Israel was where we should be a minority

at this point and those who saw the Stalin estate was the Jewish homeland. Don't forget any time there was any so-called purge, which clearly doesn't exist in the way these things are written, it was done by Jewish judges and Jewish lawyers because that's the one place where you had massive domination of Jews. I don't care about any, whatever they want to say, maybe farm managers may have been purrs. Not a big deal to them. But judges and lawyers, they continue to dominate their science the same way. But Israel kind of ruined everything.

Because where were Jews, especially when the war started, with American money, Jews, Israel starts winning, and they're winning against society's finance by the U.S.S.R. So it puts them in a terrible position. And their official language is Hebrew. So it really depended in how, this really we talk about assimilation, how assimilated the Jews were to the Soviet reality. These people now were born after the revolution for the most part.

They still do remember the so-called great patriotic war where Hitler was defeated. So Stalin was the great leader, not Khrushchev. Khrushchev was really seen as a total goi from where his parents were from and just how dumb he was. He was a terrible choice. And Brezhnev attempted to corrected some of that and failed to do that. But he did have great eyebrows. That's an aside.

Brezhnev eyebrows were legendary. They even mentioned like, Brezhneff as being one of the ugliest people on the planet and like Seinfeld. You remember that episode? I do. And, you know, when he would, they didn't have to be politicians there. So when he would go on TV to read something, he would never look up. He would be reading something from a piece of paper like this.

You know, no personality. You would never look up from the, you know, be smacking his lips all the time. Massive eyebrows in front of the camera. You know, zero. Absolutely no. And so this is no Stalin. And he was destroyed by Afghanistan anyway. And at the end, and he was Ukrainian too.

He spoke with a, with a, he used to make fun of him for his Ukrainian action. His family was from Kharkiv. So again, non-Russians in these positions. But although, although, you know, they're from a Russian-speaking area, but still, you know, that was an accent from that area. So, you know, this is, Brezhnev couldn't do it. And clearly, in Drapov, even though he was head of the KGB, they didn't live long enough.

And the only Russian one, Gorbachev, well, that was near the end. But because this guy's total lack of charisma, and he even tried to start a cult of personality. With that personality? He didn't have a personality. Khrushchev was at least funny and interesting. you got all upset when Disneyland wouldn't let them in. He wanted to see the mouth that talks.

I forget what he said. But Brezhnev was just so. There's so many comics. Dissidents had a field day with his total lack of personality. And so he was in no position to fix what Khrushchev had done. And again, after the death of Stalin, everything starts. it's falling apart slowly but surely. And we're seeing that happening now.

It reminds me of another really hilarious line from Seinfeld when George is like, ask him if it works. And the Asian guy goes, say you grow hair, you look like Stalin. Oh, I remember that. Yeah. Yeah, that stinky stuff you had to put on his head. Yeah. That actually, when I watch, when I watch out the first time, that made me laugh out loud.

Hey, funny is funny. I don't care if they're Jews. Funny is funny. you know, as far as I was concerned, they didn't have an accent because everyone I knew sounded like that. But everywhere else I went, they had an accent. Next in January 1962 came the Vilnius case of speculators in foreign currency. All eight defendants were Jews.

During the trial, non-Jewish members of the political establishment involved in the case escaped public naming, a usual Soviet trick. This time, there was an explicit anti-Jewish sentiment from the prosecution, quote, the deals were struck in a synagogue and the arguments were settled with the help of wine, end quote. Well, how could there not be? You know, and this has been going on now for a couple of years. They're taking, you know, speculation and currency, that's, currency gets its value from labor. It gets this value from hundreds of years of Russians, actual Russians and Ukrainians, working, whether it be an industry or anything else.

and they're getting wealthy manipulating the symbols of that well. It only gets its value from work. It's the, you know, if you're, in that goes to show that no one was a Marxist at this point. The only Marxists that existed in this era were in American universities and maybe in South Africa. Because this was the total opposite of anything that, anything socialist, no matter what kind of socialist you're talking about. but we did talk about we had a whole show I think on Marx's

on the Jewish question and this is exactly what he talks about but they revert the form once they get too comfortable but if the deals were struck in a synagogue well that is relevant information there's no getting out of it

this was a Jewish practice and if that causes anti-Semitism well then you know you know you know Pravda, Provident never made stuff up. They editorialized in every article,

but they never made stuff up like the American press does. That they described something just as it was, and then they would condemn it to the skies and say how wonderful Lenin was and something like that. The American press will simply create a sensational story to support the left or the Jews or whoever they're talking about. I would trust Pravda in these cases more than the American newspaper.

The American newspapers were inventing things. That, oh my God, the Soviet Union's becoming another Third Reich, even though they continue to dominate, the Jews can dominate all of these areas. And if there's one area that they absolutely dominated, was the one that was totally illegal currency speculation. Solomon Schwartz is absolutely convinced that this legal and economic harassment

was nothing else but rampant anti-Semitism. Yet he completely disregards, quote, the tendency of Jews to concentrate their activity in the specific spheres of economy. End quote. Similarly, the entire Western media interpreted this as a brutal campaign against the Jews, the humiliation and isolation of the entire people. Bertrand Russell sent a letter of protest to Khrushchev and got a personal response from the Soviet leader. However, after that, the Soviet authorities apparently had second thoughts when they handled the Jews.

This goes to show just how important the West was, their image was, to the Western world. Western corporations were always invested in the Soviet Union. The U.S., Western Europe, NATO countries were not enemies of the Soviet Union. You can't be enemies and trade with them and educate their people. There were plenty of Soviet citizens educated at a lot. in Harvard, Yale and University of London, and then sent back to the USSR without a problem. You had 100 organizations that were founded to, you know,

the Soviet American Friendship Society, a million others like this. But, you know, they didn't say that they were currency speculators in the Western press. They covered that up. They just talked about, you know, they were bankers or whatever. And that's, so this is, you know, this is exactly what I said. I didn't, I didn't read forward. I didn't know.

But again, Solomon Schwartz is here. I'm sick and tired of that guy right now. I've read him. I'm sick and tired of him showing up in all these things. I don't even know if he was in the USSR at the time. He may have left by that point. But he refused to acknowledge the Jewish domination of these fields in the Soviet Union. he was he was just did special pleading you couldn't get you couldn't get reason out of that man

and yet he was the link between the west and um um and the Soviets in terms of the jewish question he was very very important and um so he may have left by this point but i'm not sure all right i think that's a good place to end it for today I am going to encourage everyone to go over to the show notes and to go to the description of the videos and donate to Dr. Johnson's work, join his Patreon. I think his cash app is there. Also, link to his new book. It's another way you can support him by buying that.

And yeah, go over there and show Dr. Johnson how much you appreciate the information that he's sharing with us here. Thank you. you know, you know this is a absolute full-time job. I work 12 hours a day. I'm just constantly researching in numerous languages. And I need the support. I don't, you know, I wish, you know,

if I was on the Russian payroll, I wouldn't have to worry about it. What's wrong with them? I've never, they've never even approached me. My Lord. But since I'm not, and there's no institution backing me, I need you guys.

and I know some of them are very generous. If you can't afford, you can't afford a dollar, the $10. You know, it's like the New Testament story about the woman who put in two pennies. Just to give something, I appreciate it all. And I appreciate you, Pete, for promoting it all the time. Of course. So I'll see you in a couple days. Thank you.

Bye-bye.