Black Earth(12)

The Judeobolshevik myth seemed to justify a preemptive strike on a certain valuable territory against an inherently planetary enemy. It linked the elimination of the Jews to the subjugation of the Slavs. If this connection could be established in theory and Germans thrust eastward into war, Hitler could hardly fail in practice. Failure to conquer Slavs would make the case for exterminating Jews.

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The Judeobolshevik idea, a major source of the Second World War, had its origins in the First. It reached Hitler’s mind after a peculiar German experience during the collapse of the Russian Empire, on the eastern front of the First World War.

From the perspective of Berlin, the First World War was fought on a western front against France (and Britain, and later the United States) and on an eastern front against the Russian Empire. Germany was surrounded by enemies on both sides and had to try to eliminate one quickly in order to defeat the other. The attack on France in 1914 failed, condemning Germans to a long two-front war. Under these circumstances, German diplomats sought nonmilitary means of removing the Russian Empire from the conflict, such as fomenting revolution. In April 1917, after a first revolution in Russia had already taken place, Germany arranged the transport of Vladimir Lenin, the leader of the Bolsheviks, from Zurich to Petrograd in a sealed train. He succeeded, along with his comrades, in organizing a second revolution in November. He then withdrew the Russian Empire from the war. This appeared at first to be a tremendous German victory.

Before the revolutions of 1917, the Russian Empire had been the homeland of more Jews than any other country in the world—and an actively antisemitic state. Jews were subject to official forms of discrimination and targeted in pogroms of increasing intensity and frequency. These were not organized by the state, but the Russian imperial subjects who perpetrated them believed that they were following the will of the tsar. Jews were almost two hundred times more likely than ethnic Russians to emigrate from the Russian Empire, in part because they were more likely to want to leave, and in part because imperial authorities were glad to see them go. During the First World War, Jews were largely excluded from the body politic.

Jews inhabited the western regions of the Russian Empire, through which Russian imperial soldiers advanced and retreated as they engaged their German and Austrian enemies. As Russian troops marched into the lands of the Habsburg monarchy in autumn 1914, they found Jews who owned farms (which was illegal in the Russian Empire) and promptly expropriated them. In January 1915, official imperial circulars blamed Jews for sabotage. That month the Russian imperial army expelled some hundred thousand Jews from forty towns near Warsaw. Local Poles took the Jews’ property and kept it. When the Germans drove the Russians back east in 1915, Russian imperial soldiers blamed Jews and carried out about a hundred pogroms. The head of the right faction of the Russian parliament (later the minister of internal affairs) explained setbacks by referring to the plans of an international Jewish oligarchy. Meanwhile, the Russian Empire deported about half a million Jews from their homes, on the logic that they might collaborate with the invaders. The army was the agent of deportations, so soldiers and officers could loot Jews, their fellow Russian imperial subjects. This mass expulsion from the Jewish heartland, accompanied by systematic theft and frequent violence, was one of the greatest disruptions of traditional Jewish life in history.

In the minds of Europeans, the Russian deportation altered the Jewish question. Tens of thousands of Jews fled the Russian Empire, creating an impression in European cities that Jews from the East were suddenly everywhere. The deportations shaped the lives of many of the major Jewish revolutionaries of the twentieth century, both of the Right and the Left. As very young boys both Menachem Begin and Avraham Stern, later right-wing radicals, were displaced. Within the Russian Empire, Jews deported from the front made for the major cities, such as Moscow, Petrograd, and Kyiv, where they were often shunned as spies and denied employment and shelter. After the February 1917 Revolution, as the empire lurched towards becoming a republic, the Jews were formally emancipated and became citizens. Of the sixty thousand or so Jews in Moscow at this time, about half were refugees. Many of them joined Lenin in his second Russian revolution that November. Lenin thanked Jews for their decisive support in the city that he would make his capital.

As of November 1917, Jews were suddenly equal members of a new revolutionary state rather than a repressed religious minority in an empire. The vast majority of Jews tried in 1918 to return to their homes, only to find them, very frequently, inhabited by other people. The Jews’ neighbors did not want to return what they had taken, and often attacked the Jews instead. As one regime gave way to another, Jews were targeted by everyone involved. The first pogroms after the revolution were carried out by the Red Army; but the ideology of their commanders was internationalist, and officers usually tried to stop anti-Jewish violence.