Thread by @shevereshtus

Did you know that Stalin is directly responsible for the death of over 3 million Jews? Or that he was planning to kill off the rest of Soviet Jewry but was prevented by his premature death? Or that Lenin himself helped shape his antisemitic policies?

A historical thread, part 1

Preface: The problem with threads like this is, where to start? When it comes to Soviet antisemitism, the answer isn’t easy.

Do we start with the arrival of Communism & the creation of the Yevsektiya? The civil war & it's pogroms? The Tsar's antisemitism that preceded it all?

While the plan is to cover all of it, I decided to cover the deadliest period in the Soviet Jewish History, the early 30s to WWII.

Part 2 will go back in time from the end of the Tsarist regime up to the purges.

Part 3 will be the post-WWII years up to Stalin’s death.

Let’s start with a summary, then we will go into details:

* 500K-600K in the Purges
* 100Ks in the Gulags
* 50K+ during the Holodomor
* Similar numbers during the Dekulakization & other atrocities
* 2M killed by the Nazis.
* 200K who fought for the Red Army

Some might argue that the soldiers & Holocaust victims are different, but considering that the entry of Soviet Russia in WWII was predicated on Stalin allying & trusting Hitler, and his behavior during WWII, he is also directly responsible for their death as I will demonstrate.

1. The Dekulakization, the Holodomor & others

The earlier you go in time or the further north you go, the hardest it is to get accurate numbers. What we do know, however, is that a Jews were most definitely one of the first victims of the Dekulakization program in Russia.

Conservative estimates tell us that at least 50,000 were killed then. Another 50,000 or so during the orchestrated famine of the Holodomor, directed by the Stalinist regime. Thousands of Jews no doubt also died in other atrocities such as the Deportations/Displacements of the 30s

Ultimately we do not have accurate numbers of just how many died when those programs were implemented. We can only ascertain what the minimum amounts would be (such as 50k during the Holodomor)

Verdict: At the very least 100,000, though it's probably closer to 200,000.

2. The Purges

Stalin had always been an antisemite, but his hatred of Jews grew exponentially & in tandem with his hatred for both Mensheviks & Trotskyites. Before the Great Terror itself, thousands of Trotskyites, many Jewish, were brought up north, shot & thrown into ditches.

Their bodies doused in paraffin & set on fire. We know their stories because peasants close to the Arctic Circle noticed the warmth radiating from bogs and ravines they were thrown in.

The early purges were nothing compared to what was to come: The Great Terror.

The Great Terror deserves not only it's individual thread, but books and documentaries to do it justice.

The purges themselves might have began almost immediately after Stalin’s ascension to power but The Great Terror itself began in 1936 and lasted for over a year.

During that time, Stalin murdered 1 to 1.2 million of Soviet citizens, deporting many more to the Gulag, where around 100k of them died. Throughout the whole Great Terror, the Soviet organs and media were filled with antisemitic slogans, accusations and conspiracies.

It’s estimated that between 500-600,000 Jews were killed during the Stalinist purges, especially the Great Terror. Jews constituted the highest ratio of victims among all Soviet nationalities. By that point, there were almost no prominent Jews left in position of power in Russia.

If you think about the timing, this means that at the same time the world was concentrating on Hitler & his antisemitic policies, they were ignoring the wholesale slaughter of over three quarter of a million Jews in the USSR.

Verdict: 500,000 to 600,000 (over 700k-900k total)

3. The Gulags & interrogations.

As an old Tsarist official was recorded telling his cellmate:

"At least the dreams of our beloved Tsar Nicholas, which he was too soft to carry out, are being fulfilled. The prison are full of Jews and Bolsheviks."

This was Stalin's legacy.

While it’s hard to find accurate data, we know for example that out of the 300k Jewish Polish refugees who fled from the Nazis after the German incursion were promptly sent to the Gulag, where more than 100k died before the end the war (the others were sent back to Poland after).

Nearly 10k Lithuanian Jews who were deported in similar conditions died. The story repeated itself all over again for any Jewish population that sought shelter from the Nazis in the USSR.

Aside from the refugees, we also have to deal with the Soviet citizens who were sent there.

As testified by Solzhenistin & many other diaries from the gulag, Jews were overrepresented in the prisoner group. Since Jews were heavily involved in the intelligentsia, in academia, were menshivks, trostkyites, hassidim, zionists, westernized, agitators etc, it's not a surprise

Taking in account the number of Jews who were not sentenced to death (immediately) but rather sentenced to hard labor for 25 years (to die there) and the number of people who disappeared & never heard from, it's also hard by conservative estimates to say just how many were killed

Another problem is that some of these are redundant, because the victims are included as well with those killed in the purges (while they technically weren't).

There is also the matter of those who disappeared but did not die, simply lived elsewhere under another assumed name

There are also tens of thousands, if not more, who were killed during the brutal interrogations, before they even saw the inside of a court for their show trials, which complicates things.

Verdict: Hard to tally, but 100Ks (Anywhere between 800k-1.2M total, possibly more)

4. World War II

After the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, in which Hitler & Stalin divided Eastern Europe between themselves, one of the first things Stalin did after invading Poland was to turn over some 600 German communists, most of them Jews, to the Gestapo.

This happened in Brest-Litvosk, in German-occupied Poland.

This was meant as a symbolic (and clear) message: Those Jews were given over where the Bolsheviks, headed by the Jewish Trotsky and Yoffe, had signed a treaty with Germany ending the Russian participation in WWI.

Most of those 600 Jews were gassed in Majdanek, including famed composer Hans David.

Soon afterwards, more than 2 million Eastern European Jews fell under the control of the Soviet Union, mostly from Eastern Poland, Bessarabia and Bukovina.

Those were not Soviet Jews, cut off from their culture, but either very religious or very Zionist ones, who could influence the Soviet Jews they would come in contact with. Tens of thousands were immediately deported, mostly the community leaders and those deemed most important.

In February 1940, the NKVD deported 1 million Poles to Siberia, nearly half Jews. Untold numbers died en route. Those deported included Zionists & anti-Zionist Bundists, religious & non-religious Jews, both Menachem Begin & the founders of the Polish Bund were sent together north

In the Spring of 41, the Soviets were shipping enormous quantities of food & raw materials to the Nazis next door, from Soviet-occupied to German-occupied Poland. All this as the Germans were getting started with the Final Solution, and over a million Jews had been killed already

It's quite likely that not only the material aid from the Soviet helped build the very concentration & death camps those neighboring Jews ended in, but the reason why the majority ended up there was directly due to Stalin himself.

Jews in Soviet-occupied Poland, mere miles away from what was happening on the German-occupied side, were absolutely clueless about what was going on. All of Soviet media, aware of Nazi atrocities, stayed silent about the mass murdering of Jews happening miles away.

This continued until the Nazi invasion of the USSR, at which point only unspecified ‘Soviet citizens’ were reported killed. 2 million Jews were murdered, most who could have been saved or at least would have had a fighting chance if they had known what was coming for them.

“The Jews are strikingly ill-informed about our attitude towards them & the treatment Jews are receiving in Germany [..] Although they do not expect to be granted equal rights [..], they do believe that we will leave them alone if they apply themselves to their work’ - Wehrmacht

Remember this Wehrmacht report the next time someone says Jews were led sheep to the slaughter. Jews were so unaware of what the Nazis were doing that in a city near Ukraine (Kerostia), the elders of the Jewish settlement went out to greet the coming Nazis with bread and salt.

Throughout the whole war, the Soviets never mentioned once that the Nazis were murdering Jews. Nor did they take any steps in protecting their Jewish population.

Stalin was completely shocked by Hitler’s betrayal and invasion, to the point he did absolutely nothing at first.

Nothing except stay in his dasha, get blind drunk, refusing to take any calls or giving directives to the Army.

2 weeks after the opening of the hostilities, he finally spoke publicly for the first time and said that ‘Everything of value must be shipped to the rear’.

It didn’t include Jews who were not industrial personal or Communist party members. The Jewish Nation itself did not qualify as a part of the ‘especially endangered’ category and be part of the 12 to 15 millions.

There were 5 millions of Jews, 2 were killed by the Nazis.

Millions of Red Army soldiers died because of his lack of preparedness & inability to react swiftly to the German invasion. 200k out of 500k Jewish soldiers died during the War.

Verdict: 2.2M killed because of Stalin's refusal to evacuate his Jews, warn them, and poor decisions.

There are many more things to say about Stalin's relationship to the Holocaust, how he used it for propaganda while diminishing it's Jewish character especially after the war, but this will be covered in Part 3.

All this should be enough to demonstrate one thing already:

Stalin is one of the worst butchers of Jewish history, a blight upon history, and it is a shame that to this day, people will still defend him, or his name, and pretend that he was in any way a defender of the Jewish people.