/lit/ - Literature

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To quote journalist Anna Louise Strong (in The First Time in History: Two Years of Russia's New Life, 1924, pp. 172-173):

>So little is the question [if someone is a Jew or not] raised that I found it hard to discover, in my search for Jews in high posts of government, which persons were of this race and which were not. I asked Trotsky about Jews in the higher branches of state. "There are two of us in the Council of People's Commissars," he said with a smile. "Dovgalevsky, the commissar of Posts and Telegraphs, and myself."—Later, in discussing finance, he corrected himself: "I forgot; there is also Sokolnikoff, Minister of Finance. You see, I never counted them up as Jews before."

>An acquaintance of Dovgalevsky told me later that he was not a Jew, and when I replied that Trotsky said he was, he answered: "Possibly then . . . I didn't know it." There was this difficulty throughout in tracing Jews in government. In the Communist ranks, they are not thought of separately.

>I went through one commissariat after another with Trotsky and checked up the leading men. Agriculture,—he remembered four members of the presidium,—all Russians. Health,—there was Semashko, a Russian, assisted by Soloviof, a Russian. Education,—four Russians and one Jew formed the presidium. The department of National Industries had a collegium of nine; one of them was a Jew.

>In Finance they become suddenly prominent. Sokolnikoff, Commissar of Finance, and several bank presidents and members of banking staff. Yet here also many higher posts were held by Russians working together with Jews. Food, Justice, Social Welfare,—these departments are headed by non-Jews. The State Planning Board is run by Krjijanovsky, a Pole, and the State Railways by Djerjinsky, also a Pole. Thus are all races mixed in the government of Russia.

The "not thought of separately" bit isn't surprising since, to quote one historian (Solomon M. Schwarz, The Jews in the Soviet Union, 1951, p. 93):

>To be sure, a large number of Bolshevik leaders and active party members were of Jewish parentage; but they had been completely assimilated, had no ties with the Jewish masses, neither read nor write Yiddish, and in many cases understood scarcely a word of it. .

>A Commissariat for Jewish National Affairs was established in January 1918, as a special section of the People's Commissariat for National Affairs under Stalin. No Bolsheviks, however, were available to staff the Jewish Commissariat. The Jewish Commissar, Semen M. Dimanshtein, was indeed an old Bolshevik; but he had never been active in the Jewish field, and his sole qualification was his experience in the early Bolshevik campaigns against the "Jewish separatism" of the Bund.

The only prominent jew in the Bolsheviks (who was originaly a Menshevik) was Trotsky and we all know how that ended up

The most fervent defenders of unregulated capitalism on the other hand...