Lenin's Second Death

For anti-Semitic students of history, Marxism and the Zionist endeavor represent twin conspiracies that vied with each other for Jewish hearts and minds in the early twentieth century. Each achieved a milestone in November of 1917 – the Zionists with the publication of the Balfour Declaration and the communists with the Bolshevik Revolution. While Zionism serves an undisguisedly Jewish purpose, historians continue to deny the Jewish nature of Bolshevism. “Jews joined the RSDRP” – the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party – “to discard their Jewishness,” Soviet-born Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern contends, for example. Otherwise, he reasons, they would have joined an explicitly Jew-centered organization like the General Jewish Labor Bund or a Zionist group [1]. Petrovsky-Shtern neglects to consider the possibility that Jewish resentment and racially motivated efforts to undermine the host society could take forms other than those that were openly based on ethnic solidarity, and his insistence that “Jews did play some role in the Russian revolution, but their role in it was not Jewish” is both unsatisfactory and rather laughable [2]. In his interesting 2010 book Lenin’s Jewish Question, however, Petrovsky-Shtern does introduce a compelling degree of nuance into the matter of the significance of V.I. Lenin’s partial Jewish ancestry as it relates to his leadership role among the Bolsheviks.  

Controversially, Petrovsky-Shtern maintains that Lenin was unaware of his Jewish heritage, which, according to the author, was discovered by Lenin’s siblings only after the Bolshevik leader’s death. In support of this claim, he points out that Lenin’s maternal grandfather, Alexander (Yisroel) Blank, and great-grandfather, Moshko Blank – both of Ashkenazi stock – were converts to Christianity, so that no memory or remnant of Jewish identity or ritual remained in the family by Lenin’s time.

Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern

Citing examples from Lenin’s letters, writings, and interactions with Jewish colleagues, Petrovsky-Shtern makes a convincing case that the Bolshevik’s dealings with Jews were largely based on pragmatic assessments – that is, considerations of whether a given Jew was useful to him or not – and that Lenin’s preferred solution to the Jewish Question was assimilation, so that the “less one was Jewish, the better Jew one became.” [3] Among notes Lenin wrote in preparation for an essay on the national question was the formulation “Beat the Jews out of the list of nations” – his intention being to “assimilate them to the point where nothing would remain of their status as a nation.” [4]

“The Bund was sharply critiqued by Lenin, as were other Marxist groups representing national minority proletarians,” Petrovsky-Shtern points out: “Lenin deeply disliked their ethnocentric trend, which he found nationalistic.” [5] Moreover:

The Bund also took for granted that the Jews constituted a nation. Lenin agreed with Georgian and Polish Marxists but disagreed with the Bund. Although in his polemical exchanges with the Bund Lenin sometimes agreed to call the Jews a nation, elsewhere he argued against applying this notion to Jews. Lenin followed Karl Kautsky, who maintained that Jews did not have a permanent territory and therefore were not a nation. […] For Lenin – and […] also for Stalin – Jews had no common language, no common territory, and thus were not a nation and not even a people. If he did call Jews a nation, Lenin put the word “nation” in quotation marks. [6]

“From the first years of organized work of the Russian social democracy, the Bund emerged on Lenin’s political agenda as one of his two major opponents, no less important than the Mensheviks,” Petrovsky-Shtern relates [7]: “If the Jewish question could be solved through assimilation, then the Bundist problem could be solved through their dissolution in Russian social democracy” and “the Bund […] had to be marginalized and kept down.” [8] Only “grudgingly” did Lenin compromise and allow the Bund a degree of “autonomy on questions related to Jewish proletarians” [9], as notions of ethnic pluralism and of a horizontally organized party conflicted with Lenin’s centralizing tendency. “One had no choice,” Petrovsky-Shtern characterizes Lenin’s vision, but to dispense with Yahweh and “bow down to a new monotheistic deity called the Party.” [10]

According to Petrovsky-Shtern, the documentation of Lenin’s Jewish forebears only came to light in the aftermath of his death in 1924. Ironically, given his denial of a Jewish identity to any of the Bolsheviks, the author undermines his own thesis when he reveals the guilty conscience of the Soviet leadership as they attempted to suppress this information:

When Lenin’s sister [Anna Elizarova-Ulianova] discovered that the Blanks were of Jewish origin and intended to announce it […] she encountered the unified resistance of the party leadership. She could not understand that speaking about a Jewish Lenin undermined the Russian-centered identity of the party and was perceived as a surreptitious attack against its power. [11]

Anna Elizarova-Ulianova

Petrovsky-Shtern argues that the Bolshevik leadership was motivated by a desire to Russify Lenin so as to legitimize the Soviet system in the eyes of the Russian masses. He observes that, “once Stalin identified the population of the USSR with the Soviet state rather than with a revolutionary class, he paved the way for the replacement of class identity with a national and eventually ethnic identity.” [12] “The Russification of the Soviet people and the Soviet state led to promoting Russian chauvinism, enhancing Russian paternalism toward ethnic minorities, and nurturing popular xenophobia,” he continues: “Although this process did not reach its apogee until after World War II, it presupposed the creation of a pure Russian image of Lenin as early as the 1920s.” [13] Additionally, official exposure of the mischling background of the world-famous founder of the Soviet state would have furnished further ammunition to anti-Semitic critics of the communist experiment not only in Russia, but internationally.

Consequently, when Lenin’s sister produced proof of the family’s Jewish roots, Lenin Institute head Lev Kamenev “judged the discovery unfit for dissemination, ruled against publication of documents on Lenin’s Jewish relatives, and instructed Elizarova-Ulianova to keep her discovery a secret.” [14] “By hiding Lenin’s […] Jewish relatives he was also hiding his own,” Petrovsky-Shtern acknowledges:

He knew only too well that in the Western press the name Trotsky was “Bronshtein” in brackets, and he did not want to see his own name followed by “Rosenfeld”, let alone Lenin’s followed by “Blank” [rather than Ulianov, his actual surname]. On the other hand, Kamenev’s stance was not a personal innovation: he was continuing the party line of creating an internationalist communist identity centered in the Russian one. [15]

Lev Kamenev and V.I. Lenin

Anna Elizarova-Ulianova, citing concern about rising anti-Semitism among Soviet leadership, wrote to Stalin in 1932 asking permission to publicize Lenin’s Jewish heritage [16] – but without success:

Perhaps Stalin […] grasped what Kamenev had understood before him – that Lenin’s Jewishness would undermine Lenin as a symbol of the Russian revolutionary leadership. Stalin could be a Russified Georgian, Lazar Kaganovich a Russified Jew, and Anastas Mikoian a Russified Armenian, but the founder of the party and the state had to be Russian. […]

Stalin sent his answer to the rebellious Anna Elizarova-Ulianova through the subservient [sister] Mariia Il’inichna Ulianova, who agreed with the party line on the matter. According to Mariia Ulianova, Stalin ordered her sister to keep “absolute silence on this matter.” [17]

Anna later wrote to Stalin a second time, again citing the need to fight anti-Semitism, and did not receive a reply [18]. “Everyone dealing with this issue after Kamenev – Stalin, Brezhnev, and Gorbachev – arrived at the same decision,” summarizes Petrovsky-Shtern [19]. “Lenin was untouchable. He was the Russian Lenin. Any assault on his faultless Russian image and pure blood was an assault on the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.” [20] Further:

In 1986, Mikhail Gorbachev, reputedly an open-minded liberal and then the CPSU secretary general, had the documents collected as File No. 3 and wrote: “Open only with permission of the Head of the General Department of the [Communist Party] Central Committee.” That is to say, he considered it, as had all his party predecessors, top-secret information. His private remarks to the Politburo members in the 1980s testify to his own racial prejudice, largely overlooked in the West. Until the last years of perestroika and the collapse of communism, Lenin’s Jewish relatives remained beyond his family history. [21]

Petrovsky-Shtern attributes to “racial prejudice” Gorbachev’s refusal to acknowledge Lenin’s genealogy even amid the atmosphere of Glasnost, or “transparency” – not considering the likelihood that Gorbachev instead acted out of concern for Jewish welfare in Russia as the Soviet Union’s brand of Marxian patriotism was increasingly discredited and the inevitable advent of freedom of speech threatened to open the gates for the return of open anti-Semitism to Russian political discourse along with anticommunism. “Lenin’s Jewish origins surfaced just before and immediately after the collapse of the USSR,” Petrovsky-Shtern relates:

[…] yet some, including Olga Ulianova, Lenin’s niece, continued to deny Jewish relations. Debates in the press ensued […] For most of them, if not all, the seventy-year suppression of discussion of Lenin’s Jewish relatives was proof of the antisemitism of the regime. One Russian journalist called the handling of Lenin’s genealogy by the communists a “fig leaf covering the outright fascist nakedness” of Stalin’s rule.” [22]

“The collapse of the USSR […] vividly demonstrated that the class-based communist vocabulary was a very thin and inefficient veil for the Russocentric xenophobia of Soviet officialdom,” Petrovsky-Shtern asserts [23]. The postcommunist nineties, simultaneously with the ascendancy of Jewish oligarchs, saw the popular rediscovery of such anti-Semitic writers as Mikhail Menshikov and Vassili Shulgin. It was amid the new culture of comparative political liberty, too, that David Duke traveled to Russia to speak at the invitation of nationalist intellectual Alexander Prokhanov [24]. The ironic result of the decades-long suppression of Lenin’s partial Jewish ancestry was that, once the secret was out, his biological and even spiritual Jewishness was not only emphasized but actually exaggerated:

The newly available racist writings honed the skills of Russian xenophobes, fostered their renewed attempts at writing Soviet history, and produced new anticommunist Russian historiography – a popular parascience. After the revealing publications on the Blanks in the 1990s by [Mikhail] Shtein, [Vsevolod] Tsaplin, and others, Vladimir Soloukhin declared Lenin’s nationality the most important issue for understanding the Russian revolution. For Soloukhin it was enough to establish that Lenin was of Jewish origin in order to make sense of each and every action he had undertaken against Mother Russia. Soloukhin […] cited the baptism documents of Abel and Yisroel [Blank], and dismissed altogether the impact of baptism on what he claimed to be the indelible Jewishness of the Blanks.

The racist Soloukhin knew that to reveal somebody’s Jewishness was enough to explain history. Therefore, if the discovered Jewishness was only partial, he needed to bend over backwards to make it complete. Soloukhin proceeded to discuss the possible Jewishness of Anna Ivanovna Grosschopf, the Christian wife of the Christian Alexander Dmitrievich Blank. He referred to Mariia Alexandrovna, Lenin’s mother, as Mariia Izrailevna, using a Jewish patronymic that she did not have. He claimed she had not had even a gram of Russian blood and was either half or completely Jewish. Then Soloukhin turned to a murky history of Lenin’s father, of Kalmyk origin, and established as fact that Il’ia Ulianov had a peculiar speech disorder – he burred his letter R. Since burring the R in the Russian cultural tradition is almost always associated with alien intellectuals or Jews, Soloukhin asked sarcastically whether his readers had ever seen a Kalmyk burring his R. Thus, Soloukhin maintained that not only Lenin’s mother but also his father was Jewish – both facts carefully concealed by the Bolsheviks. While Soloukhin admitted that Lenin himself was linguistically and culturally Russian, spiritually, Soloukhin argued, Lenin was still a Jew. [25]

Another writer, Akim Arutiunov, whom Petrovsky-Shtern dismisses as “a technocrat with no background in humanities and no historical skills,” conversely “portrayed Lenin’s father as a true Russian man” and “a selfless populist concerned about the education of the Russian people” but blamed Lenin’s Jewish mother for her son’s revolutionary career. “Due to her harmful influence,” Petrovsky-Shtern summarizes Arutiunov’s interpretation, her children “all grew up into revolutionaries, terrorists, tsar-killers, rebels, and antichrists.” [26] “This viewpoint,” Petrovsky-Shtern adds, “garnered renown through Oleg Platonov, the most popular historian of the Russian far right” [27] – and the “leading active backer of Holocaust denial in Russia” according to Stephen Atkins, who also observes that Platonov forged ties with America’s Institute for Historical Review [28], illustrating the international ramifications of the spread of the previously taboo information in the new online age. “The backwards conversion of Lenin into Blank in postcommunist Russian discourse helped Russian far-rightists to dismiss the Russian revolution as a horrible and terrifying Jewish contribution,” Petrovsky-Shtern writes [29]. Moreover:

Russian far-rightists knew how to use the mass media to reach out to the populace – and they did so successfully. The internet, multiple popular history books, and Russian Orthodox Church media constantly pointed to Lenin-Blank as a universal answer. As a result, the myth of a Jewish Lenin moved from the salons of the elitist champions of blood and soil into the streets of the Russian provinces. [30]

“They all depicted the Russian revolution as a Jewish matter,” Petrovsky-Shtern concludes:

Russian Jewry was an oxymoron to them. However significant Jews were to Russian history, they did not belong there. If they did, then it was only as enemies of the Russian people and as aliens to the Russian soil and spirit. [31]

That soil, if present geopolitical trends persist, promises to become more inhospitable still – regardless of all the secret memoranda of the likes of Kamenev and the wishes and machinations of all the Masha Gessens, Anne Applebaums, and Victoria Nulands in the world.

Rainer Chlodwig von K.

Endnotes

[1] Petrovsky-Shtern, Yohanan. Lenin’s Jewish Question. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010, p. xiv.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid., p. 78.

[4] Ibid., p. 79.

[5] Ibid., p. 80.

[6] Ibid., p. 81.

[7] Ibid., p. 82.

[8] Ibid., pp. 83-84.

[9] Ibid., p. 85.

[10] Ibid., p. 86.

[11] Ibid., p. 99.

[12] Ibid., p. 101.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Ibid., p. 104.

[15] Ibid., pp. 104-105.

[16] Ibid., p. 106.

[17] Ibid., p. 108.

[18] Ibid., pp. 109-111.

[19] Ibid., p. 104.

[20] Ibid., p. 125.

[21] Ibid., p. 129.

[22] Ibid., p. 130.

[23] Ibid., p. 157.

[24] Ibid., pp. 158-159.

[25] Ibid., pp. 159-160.

[26] Ibid., p. 165.

[27] Ibid.

[28] Atkins, Stephen E. Holocaust Denial as an International Movement. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2009, p. 138.

[29] Petrovsky-Shtern, Yohanan. Lenin’s Jewish Question. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010, p. 170.

[30] Ibid., p. 168.

[31] Ibid., pp. 166-167.