Gorin says the exhibit “tells honestly and openly of how Jews did have an outsized role in the revolution. “At a time when the Red Army had posters denouncing anti-Semitism, the monarchists fighting for the czar had posters disseminating as a pillar of what they were fighting for,” he said. “The observant Jews thought in 1917 that the communists would allow them to extend Jewish life, the Zionists thought the revolution would advance their goals and there was a feeling of liberation,” Gorin said.īut it’s not like Russian Jews ever really had a choice. Jews in the top echelon of the Communist Party during its early days in power included Yakov Sverdlov, its executive secretary Grigori Zinoviev, head of the Communist International press commissar Karl Radek foreign affairs commissar Maxim Litvinov as well as Lev Kamenev and Moisei Uritsky. Though the first Soviet government – the Council of People’s Commissars – was mostly non-Jewish, Jews did occupy very prominent positions throughout the Bolshevik and communist chains of command vastly disproportionate to their percentage of the general population, Gorin confirmed. Regardless of the exact makeup of the first Soviet government, “there was great and undeniable enthusiasm among basically all the elements that made up Russian Jewry during the revolution,” said Gorin, who runs the $50 million state-of-the-art museum that last year won an award from UNESCO for its promotion of tolerance. 17, is a picture from 1918 of activists for the Socialist Poale Zion group flying a Hebrew-language banner in what today is Saint Petersburg. The Bolsheviks were members of the radical faction that ultimately dominated other streams in the communist revolutionary movement against the czar’s rule.Īmong the items in the exhibition, which opened on Oct. In 2003, he wrote, “Although officially Jews have never made up more than five percent of the country’s total population, they played a highly disproportionate and probably decisive role in the infant Bolshevik regime,” adding this was a “taboo” that many historians for decades preferred to ignore. (Flickr Commons/Sergey Norin)īut the facts also reaffirm in essence assertions like the ones made by Mark Weber, a promoter of Holocaust denial.
Moscow’s Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center, since its opening in 2012, has tackled the subject of Jewish revolutionaries. They bust some myths, including the fallacy repeated in 2013 by none other than President Vladimir Putin, who said at the museum that anti-Semitic persecution of Jews in the former Soviet Union occurred even though “the first Soviet government was 80-85 percent Jewish.” (In fact, it had one Jewish member - Leon Trotsky, founder of the Red Army). It opened last month under the title “The History of One People During the Revolution.” The facts emerge from hundreds of photographs, documents, propaganda leaflets and artworks that comprise the exhibition. “But now the time has come to look at the facts.” “For many years, neither Jews nor the authorities wanted to open up the subject, which became the stuff of myths for the ultranationalists, neo-Nazis and other anti-Semites,” said Boruch Gorin, chairman of Moscow’s Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center.
Yet ahead of the centenary, Russia’s main Jewish museum – which since its opening in 2012 has tackled head-on the subject of revolutionary Jews in its permanent display - unveiled an exhibition that underlines unapologetically how and why Jews became central to the revolution. Or the anti-Semitic hate campaign leveled at a Jewish director, Alexei Uchitel, whose studio in the same city was firebombed in September, presumably for his unfavorable depiction in a feature film of Nicholas II, the czar whose reign the revolution ended. Tolstoy said Jews use their positions in the media and government to continue the work of ancestors who “pulled down our churches” in 1917. At a January news conference, he blamed Jews with interfering in a plan to relocate a church in Saint Petersburg.
It’s a logical strategy, given the rhetoric of senior politicians like Peter Tolstoy, the deputy speaker of the Russian parliament.