Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, Volume 1 (17 page)

What was the “valued and important assistance” the Zionists were expected to provide in Russia and America?

There has never been, and probably never will be, an official answer to that question. Writers and other interested parties have to work it out for themselves. Such a task would be impossible without an understanding of the British and Allied position in the war when the Balfour Declaration was issued and, most important of all, in the months leading up to it—the months in which the Zionists were bargaining with the anti-Semitic British foreign secretary and his representatives.

Neumann’s phrase “hard pressed” to describe Britain’s situation in the war was a considerable understatement.

In the spring of 1917 Allied fortunes in the war were at their lowest. Defeat rather than victory was in prospect. The much respected British historian whose work helped to inform my schoolboy learning days, J.A.R. Marnott, put it this way: “The Allied position was unspeakably grave”. For Britain “literally everything depended on her sailors and ships.”
³

In February the Germans had intensified the war by resorting to “unrestricted” submarine warfare—the sinking without warning of anything afloat. This included unarmed merchant vessels and hospital ships and, also, the vessels of neutral nations, America being the first and foremost of them at the time. The all-out German submarine offensive was terribly effective. The loss of British ships and lives became so great that the strain on the British was perilously close to breaking point. On the basis of British losses, the Germans believed that Britain would have to surrender by 1 August at the latest. For its part the British Admiralty had calculated that unless the German submarine peril could be countered, surrender could not be postponed beyond November. (I remind myself and readers as necessary that the date of the issuing of the Balfour Declaration was 2 November).

As we shall see in Chapter Seven, the British and the French brought the disaster of unrestricted German submarine warfare upon themselves, and prolonged the conflict, because they rejected President Wilson’s mediation. But in the months leading up to the Balfour Declaration it was not only what was happening at sea and on the Western land front that suggested Britain and her allies were facing the prospect of defeat. There was alarm in London and elsewhere about the prospect of losing Russia as an ally in the war.

The developing situation in revolutionary Russia was very complicated and, at the time, it must have been difficult for diplomats to read.

In 1914 Imperial Russia had mobilised rapidly and greatly assisted the Allies in the early months of the war. (The German army could have crushed either France or Russia alone, but not both together). In 1916 Russian forces won a series of victories against the Turks and raised British hopes that Russia would be able to provide effective assistance to the Allied cause in Mesopotamia (broadly the Iraq of today). But Russia’s troops were ill equipped, lacking both guns and munitions and, in the lower ranks, the motivation to fight and die for a repressive regime which cared nothing for its masses and their poverty. Russian efforts in the field became paralysed by gross maladministration and, probably, some treachery.

Simply stated, the imperial Russian edifice on which the British were relying was rotten to the core; and it collapsed on 12 March 1917. Three days later Tsar Nicholas, a pathetic figure, abdicated. He would have been content if, to keep him in power, Russian troops had fired on his people. They were fed up with standing in food lines and were demonstrating about the breakdown of everything. When it became clear that Russian troops were not going to fire on their own people—there were mutinies against orders to do so in some barracks, and when still the Tsar refused to dismiss his exceptionally incompetent and unpopular administration and appoint a “government of public confidence”, the end of a thousand years of monarchy in Russia was at hand. Tsar Nicholas, his wife and their children were imprisoned and subsequently murdered.

The collapse of the Old Order in Russia constituted the first revolution and was regarded in Western Europe as the revolution of the “moderates”. When a Provisional Government took power the British asked themselves two questions.

The first was: Would the Provisional Government have the will to keep Russia in the war, even at the cost of suppressing opposition to it if necessary?

The second question was: Would the Provisional Government have the ability to contain and then defeat the emerging anti-capitalist or communist forces, in order to prevent a second revolution and the creation of a communist Russia? (The most significant of the emerging anti-capitalist or communist movements was that of the Bolsheviks).

Because the British were staring down the barrel at defeat they felt they could not afford to let events in revolutionary Russia take their own course. They needed to have a way of influencing them.

Cue the Zionists.

As we have seen, Herzl was content to prop up the Old Order (repressive and rotten to the core) in Russia by consenting to Plevhe’s wish to use Zionism as an anti-revolutionary taskforce. And that was precisely what Weizmann offered Britain, and subsequently at the Paris Peace Conference all the victorious capitalist powers—Zionism as an anti- revolutionary, actually anti-communist, taskforce.

Because of their experience of poverty and persecution including pogroms in the Russian empire of the Tsars, many Russian Jews had become radicalised and active participants in the struggle for change. (It was, in fact, Jewish workers who formed Russia’s first mass socialist organisation, the General Jewish Workers League or Bund) They had played a major role in mobilising the masses in the years leading up to the collapse of monarchy. Unlike the three million of their co-religionists who abandoned their Russian homeland between 1881 and 1915, they were fired by noble ideals of a better and more just society in Russia. They were, in short, in the vanguard of those who favoured going all the way to real revolution and the establishment of a communist system and terminating Russia’s participation in the war. From the British perspective… If the Jews of Russia who were committed to real revolution could be persuaded to change their minds— break with or distance themselves from the anti-capitalist or communist forces, or be confronted if they refused—the prospects for keeping Russia in the war and the communists out of power would be much improved.

In that context enormous significance was attached to the fact that one of the two most important and influential leaders of the real Russian revolution in-the-making was Jewish.

His real name was Lev Davidovich Bronstein. He was born in the village of Yanokova in the Ukraine on 26 October 1879. His father, David, was a farmer who had settled in the steppe region. His mother, Anna, was middle class and well educated.

At the age of eight Davidovich Bronstein was sent to school in Odessa. For the next eight years he lived there with the family of his mother’s nephew, a liberal intellectual. The young Bronstein demonstrated intellectual brilliance and remarkable literary and linguistic gifts.

In 1896 Bronstein moved to Nikolayev to complete his schooling. There he was drawn into an underground Socialist circle and introduced to Marxism. After a brief spell at the University of Odessa he returned to Nikolayev to help organise the underground South Russian Workers’ Union. Then, in January 1898, Bronstein was arrested for revolutionary activity. His punishment was exile to Siberia. Four years later he escaped on a forged passport bearing the name he was to keep as his revolutionary pseudonym. The name? Leon Trotsky. With that name the Jewish Bronstein was to become, in the perception of British policymakers, the biggest potential threat to the continuation of empire and the economic benefits Britain derived from it.

After his escape, Bronstein, now Trotsky, went to London. There he joined a group of Russian Social Democrats working with Vladimir Ulyanov, the founder of the Bolshevik Party, and who, as Lenin, would become the first leader of communist Russia. Their main project at the time was production of the revolutionary newspaper
Iskra
(
The Spark
). Because of his intellectual brilliance and his remarkable abilities as a speaker, writer and organiser, Trotsky quickly assumed a leading role.

At the Second Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party, held in Brussels and London in 1903, Trotsky sided with the Menshevik faction which advocated a democratic approach to Socialism. That put Trotsky, in principle, in opposition to Lenin and his Bolsheviks. Effectively Trotsky was (then) rejecting Lenin’s dictatorial methods and the Bolshevik concept of immediate revolution and taking power by all and any means.

With the outbreak of revolutionary disturbances there in 1905, Trotsky returned to Russia. He became the leading spokesman of the St. Petersburg Soviet (Council) of Workers’ Deputies when it organised a revolutionary strike movement and other measures against the Tsarist government. For that he was arrested, tried and exiled to Siberia. Again. And again he escaped. This time he settled in Vienna and supported himself as a war correspondent. (He covered the Balkan wars of 1912–13). He continued to be very active in Russian Social-Democratic émigré circles as a celebrated but isolated figure on the left-wing of the Menshevik faction. And he engaged in polemical exchanges with Lenin and the Bolsheviks over organisational matters and tactical questions.

At the outbreak of World War I, Trotsky joined the majority of Russian Social Democrats in condemning the war and refusing to support the war effort of the Tsarist regime. He moved to Switzerland and then to France where he helped to edit a Russian anti-war journal. That led to his expulsion from France and he moved to Spain. In turn he was expelled from there and in January 1917 he arrived in New York.

It was from neutral America that Trotsky hailed the revolution of the “moderates”. But so far as he and Lenin were concerned it was unfinished business, and both called for the overthrow of the Provisional Government by the workers. Anti-capitalist or communist leaders saw the Provisional Government for what it really was—something close to a British puppet regime.

Trotsky then decided it was time for him to return to Russia to play a leadership role in the unfolding events. The British authorities and their agents everywhere put great effort into trying to prevent both Trotsky and Lenin from returning to their homeland. At the time of the first revolution the Bolshevik Party was very small with fewer than 30,000 members. And it was disoriented. Most of its leaders, not only Lenin, were in exile abroad or imprisoned in Siberia. A smallish, leaderless revolutionary movement was not so much of a threat. Or so the British assumed.

In retrospect there is a respectable case for saying that even though the British failed to prevent Trotsky and Lenin returning to Russia to organise, the anti-capitalists or communists would still not have triumphed—i.e. Russia might not have gone communist, if Britain with Zionism’s assistance had not had sufficient influence and clout to induce the Provisional Government to keep Russia in the war against the will and protests of Russia’s impoverished and angry masses. It was the Provisional Government’s continuing pro-war policy and popular opposition to it that gave the Bolsheviks the opportunity they needed to win support and generate momentum.

At one level British and Zionist influence on the Provisional Government was exercised through its War Minister, Aleksandr Kerensky. In July he was induced to halt the revolutionary momentum with a crackdown on the Bolshevik leadership in particular and the communists in general. Lenin managed to avoid arrest and went into hiding in Finland. Trotsky was jailed. After that Kerensky became prime minister and his liberal Provisional Government swung to the right. But not, apparently, far enough to the right for the British.

At the time he was jailed, Trotsky was not a Bolshevik because of his opposition to Lenin’s dictatorial ways. But in jail he became a Bolshevik and was elected to membership of the Bolshevik Central Committee. When he was released from prison in September, and with Lenin still in hiding, the Jewish Trotsky became the principal leader of the Bolshevik Party in its preparations to take power.

Trotsky owed his freedom to Kerensky’s fear that the British were plotting with conservative forces of the Old Order to have him replaced by his chief of staff, General Lavr Kornilov. By releasing Trotsky and relaxing the ban on the Bolsheviks, Kerensky was placing an each way bet for his own survival. By this time the political situation in Russia was extremely complicated with nobody but the Bolsheviks knowing who could be trusted.

The second revolution came as something of an anti-climax. On the afternoon of 25 October, in one of the most impassioned speeches of his life, Trotsky proclaimed the overthrow of the Provisional Government and introduced Lenin in public as the first leader of what was to become the Soviet Union.

The coming to power of Lenin and his Bolsheviks effectively marked the end of Russia’s participation in World War I; but at the time Britain was still so desperate that it was not prepared to accept the
fait accompli
—the Bolshevik victory.

Britain and her remaining allies, including by now America, were so alarmed that they resorted to direct military intervention in Russia’s affairs. The opportunity for intervention came when Lenin’s Russia was torn by civil war, brought about, at least in part, by Zionism’s agents. The Allies took the side of the anti-communist Russians, the “Whites”, against Lenin’s “Reds”. The “Whites” were led by officers of the old Russian army. How far the British and the French might have pushed on with their intervention if President Wilson had not insisted on the escalation being stopped is a good question. The civil war ended with victory for Lenin’s “Reds”; and that was due in no small part to Trotsky’s success, then as war minister, in building a new Red Army out of the shambles of the old Russian army.