What was going on with the Jews during the Russian Revolution?

A short selection from "With Denikin's Armies"

It seems like everyone is going through another cycle of fixation on everyone’s favorite topic: The Jews. I know people are already prone to talking about this in sober and reasonable ways but I was doing some reading on one of my favorite topics, the Russian Revolution, and thought that I could throw a memoir from the period into the mix.

The memoir is With Denikin’s Armies: Being a Description of the Cossack Counter-Revolution in South Russia, 1918-1920. The book is a very engaging account of the rise and fall of the White Army on the Southern front of the Russian Civil War. It was written by John Ernst Hodgson, on whom there is very little background available. Hodgson was dispatched by a “group of British newspapers” to cover the situation in South Russia, from which it was very difficult to find reliable information.

It seems clear that Hodgson had extensive connections with Winston Churchill who, despite his later appeasement of Stalin during and after WW2, was, in 1919 during the events of the book, a fanatical anti-communist and the Secretary of State for War and Air. Hodgson received special treatment from both the War Department and the Passport Office. “Journalists” operating during this period often had intelligence connections and I strongly suspect that that was the case here. This isn’t always nefarious, though it certainly can be.

The book With Denikin’s Armies was completed in 1922 though it wouldn’t be published until 1932. Again, I think this suggests that Hodgson was working for British intelligence in some capacity. Despite this somewhat strange background, I really think that Hodgson is being honest in his observations. The book is candid about the successes and failures of the White Army and the situation in Russia at the time, and many details he includes correspond with what I find in other memoirs from the period. I think the intent of this book was to inform rather than persuade: His mission was over, most of the organizations involved no longer existed, a lot of the people mentioned were dead, he could finally tell his story. The book has been out-of-print for nearly a century and can’t be purchased anywhere, but scans can be found online.

With Denikin’s Armies is really well written (I love the style of English writers from this period). It’s also really funny, especially when it talks about the Jews. The role of Jews in the Russian Revolution and Russian Civil War was very important but was somewhat taboo to talk about for a while. As that taboo has disappeared (which is good, because these issues are critical to understanding the period), it seems like discussions of this topic have become much dumber. I think the following selection does a pretty good job capturing the situation, at least in South Russia, even if I don’t agree with everything he says (and strongly disagree with parts). This is just one guy’s perspective, but I think it’s worth reading and understanding.

If you’re someone who is going to get angry because something is too antisemitic or not antisemitic enough, please just grin and bear it and keep going until the end. There’s something in here for everyone.

I really was struck by how many of the dysfunctional behaviors Hodgson describes are exactly the same as the ones you encounter today. It’s genuinely uncanny. Doing so much reading about the Russian Revolution really has been rewarding for this reason, there’s nothing new under the sun. My hope is that if people engage with this period in detail, in good faith, and with an open mind, they will be able to avoid the traps that so many fell into and make it through the tumultuous times no doubt ahead.

I’ve included a few footnotes and added in the maps from the books (which were not a part of this selection) just to break up the text. There was no editorial intent here beyond enhancing readability a bit. I have bolded sections from the selection that I think are particularly funny or relevant to our situation today. This bolding was not in the original text.

One final note, I’ve written a short series on the history of the Russian Revolution to provide a general narrative and help frame your thinking when you read more specific material, like this selection. This series was written in a way that anyone could understand it without any background information at all. Please read this, I promise you’ll learn something important.

Part 1: The February and October Revolutions
Part 2: Post-Revolution Russian politics/The aftermath of the October Revolution
Part 3: National and ethnic divisions within the Russian Empire/The Ice March
Part 4: Ukraine, Finland, and the Revolt of the Czechoslovak Legion/Regicide
Part 5: Disaster for Lenin/Enter Wrangel

And, without further ado, here is the text:

[Begin selection, pg. 56]

…I had not been with Denikin more than a month before I was forced to the conclusion that the Jew represented a very big element in the Russian upheaval. The officers and men of the Army laid practically all the blame for their country's troubles on the Hebrew. They held that the whole cataclysm had been engineered by some great and mysterious secret society of international Jews, who, in the pay and at the orders of Germany, had seized the psychological moment and snatched the reins of government. All the figures and facts that were then available appeared to lend colour to this contention. No less than 82 per cent of the Bolshevik Commissars were known to be Jews,¹ the fierce and implacable “Trotsky,” who shared office with Lenin, being a Yiddisher whose real name was Bronstein. Among Denikin's officers this idea was an obsession of such terrible bitterness and insistency as to lead them into making statements of the wildest and most fantastic character. Many of them had persuaded themselves that Freemasonry was, in alliance with the Jews, part and parcel of the Bolshevik machine, and that what they called the diabolical schemes for Russia's downfall had been hatched in the Petrograd and Moscow Masonic lodges.² When I told them that I and most of my best friends were Freemasons, and that England owed a great deal to its loyal Jews, they stared at me askance and sadly shook their heads in fear for England's credulity in trusting the chosen race. One even asked me quietly whether I personally was a Jew. When America showed herself decidedly against any kind of interference in Russia, the idea soon gained wide credence that President Woodrow Wilson was a Jew, while Mr Lloyd George was referred to as a Jew whenever a cable from England appeared to show him as being lukewarm in support of the anti-Bolsheviks. I instanced the way in which our Jews had more than justified the granting to them of all political rights, and the Russians retorted that less than 100 years had gone since an advanced country like England felt herself able to remove many of the disabilities from which they suffered. I explained that the civic freedom given to the Jews in the early part of the last century was but the culmination of a national policy which had been quietly operating towards that end for several hundreds of years, and that for many generations prior to 1829 Jews in England had possessed, in common with their fellow-citizens, the full right to own property and to be protected from personal injury. At the time when England treated the Jews really harshly the world was so young politically that the English themselves were without the franchise. My friends fell back on the discredited antediluvian argument that no man or body of men have any real rights to power in the State, and that admission to political power is a mere matter of favour. One emerged from these talks with the impression that the average Russian loved a debate for its own sake, that he started from a fixed point and always managed to get back to that point, and that he was able to think deep down into himself but seldom along extraneous lines. This may be why his thinking has seldom been progressive and constructive. He reminded me of the classic story of the Byzantine theologians who went on discussing metaphysics while the Turks thundered at the gates of their city.

The terrible hatred borne by nearly all good Russians towards the Jews can be accounted for. When the latter race distributed itself over the earth's surface a huge number of its members settled in Poland. These gradually percolated through all Russia, and it is known that quite recently the proportion of them inhabiting Russia to those living in England was as sixty to one. They are naturally a very enterprising race, and have found no difficulty in imposing themselves upon the Russians. The principal reason for the prejudice which existed, therefore, was the fear with which the Russians regard the Jews. In their hearts they doubted their ability to hold their own against a race possessing such acuteness and virility. When they expressed horror at the extent to which we English admit the Jews to our Councils and to the responsibilities of State, they forget that not only are the Jews numerically weaker in England than in Russia, but that the English are more fitted by education and general forwardness to admit them to political brotherhood without the slightest fear of being betrayed or worsted.

I will quote only one instance which illustrates this fear which the Russian has always had of the Jews. In one of the senior universities the latter were compelled by law to obtain 40 per cent more marks than Russians in order to qualify for degrees. In the case of another university it was necessary for the Jew to obtain 40 per cent more marks than a Russian in order to qualify him even for admission. What my friends could not see was that this simply amounted to a guarantee that all Jewish graduates faced the world as men 40 per cent better educated than Gentile Russians.

It was useless to ask Denikin's officers to infuse a little sweet reasonableness into their outlook. I pointed out to them that after centuries of the most bloody and terrible oppression at the hands of the Russians, it was only to be expected that the resentment harboured by the Jews should take concrete form when power fell for a time into their hands. I could not, of course, deny the awful outrages which the Jewish Commissars were accused of committing, but in attempting to allay the seething anger in their Russian hearts I instanced the excesses that had been a feature of practically every revolution in history. I asked them why, if the Jews were held universally in such bitter contumely, they had been able to climb on to the revolutionary waggon in such numbers. The reply was that they had been presented with a great chance under Bolshevism, which set out to appeal to the proletariat. The Russian masses were far and away the most easily swayed in all the world, and were strikingly susceptible to the eloquence of the agitator. Illiterate and dull, they had never entertained quite the same feeling of aversion towards the Jews as had the upper classes.

---

Mention has already been made of the obstacles that had been placed in the way of those Jews who were desirous of obtaining the highest kind of education and of the inevitable effect such a line of action would have upon the Jewish attitude towards the old regime. Yet another instance of failure to grasp the elements of good government is supplied by the way in which school teachers were treated under the Czar. In the semi-darkness which preceded the Revolution an effort was made to raise the status of the teacher by a party within the Council of Empire which had formed a rough and more or less correct idea as to the general trend of things. In 1908 the noble sum of £2000 was allotted for the purpose of “increasing the teaching staff and augmenting the incomes” of the teachers throughout the Muscovite dominions. At that time the population of Russia was estimated to be in the neighbourhood of 135,000,000. The reformers were too parsimonious and too slow. The avalanche was upon them before their plans had a chance of maturing.

If experience of the absolute necessity of equipping national schools with reasonably well-paid staffs is of any value, then Russia affords us plenty of it. Before the year 1917 the schoolmaster there was a social nonentity. His pay ranged from £30 to £40 a year, the lowest in the civilized world, and his zeal for disseminating anarchistic views among his pupils was immense. He was conscious of the fact that he was an outcast, that the Imperial form of Government meant him to continue as one, and that under a new, idealistic and pseudointellectual regime he and his class were more likely to get a square deal than under the Czarists. He, the man in whose hands lay the future of the race, was largely dependent for food and lodging on the impoverished parents of the scholars. The latter were the only people to whom he could unburden his bursting soul. In every big batch of Red prisoners brought in by the Cossacks were several ex-schoolmasters, with many of whom I was allowed to have long conversations. It was by talking to these men that I was enabled to form some view of their reason for holding their particular political faith. Although the ranks of the White Army included a large proportion of well-educated men, very few of them had followed the teaching profession. The attitude of the Russian schoolmaster towards the State, and the way in which that attitude was transmitted to his charges—old as well as young—was foreshadowed unconsciously by Pope when he wrote:

“Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer
And without sneering, teach the rest to sneer."

---

Government in Russia has for four centuries been jealously conserved in the hands of the particular group which has happened at any particular time to surround the throne. Russia has never had a ruler possessed of sufficient political prescience to prompt him to throw the door of legislative office wide open to every able or aspiring man, irrespective of the class from which he may be drawn. The consequence was that there was no class in the country either trained or experienced in administrative procedure. When the Revolution swept the old institutions away things were, for this reason, in a state of chaos everywhere; but although the Bolshevists leaders were largely theorists, they were at the same time men who had devoted long years to the study of problems of government and whose minds were attuned to a high pitch of analytical criticism. It was not hard to imagine that a period of actual practice in office would bring these men such a wealth of experiences and disillusionments that an improved and perhaps workable system of government might in time emerge from the welter of experiments. It was impossible to make Denikin's men see this. If one valued their friendship, as I did, it was often positively dangerous to ask for this point to be taken into consideration.

I mention these things here apropos of the fact that South Russia in 1919 appeared to lack political cohesion and governmental organization. The truth first thrust itself upon my notice in Rostov, the big commercial city which lies at the mouth of the Don. With vitriolic diatribes against the Jews still ringing in my ears I was confronted with the fact that the streets were literally packed with members of that race. Money-changers, jewellery merchants, dealers in skins and furs, men of dubious occupation, all of them obviously of Semitic blood, crowded the highways of Denikins biggest city. If, I argued, they constituted such a great menace to the State, why were they not interned wholesale, or at least carefully catalogued, closely watched, and made to report periodically to the military? Such a procedure has either frightened the Russians by reason of the size of the task, or had never occurred to them at all. That the Jews in Rostov were a baneful element to Denikin was abundantly true. If ever a rumour adverse to his cause gained currency, if ever a lie began to creep round South Russia which would have the effect of sapping public confidence, if a harmful or fabricated cablegram from Europe got into circulation, the Rostov Jews were responsible. They appeared to me to be contemptible people, and, quite unlike the majority of our own Jews, apparently owed patriotic allegiance to no country. They were quite incapable of serving any cause but the most debased type of commercialism.

As the war progressed it became increasingly plain that pogroms were to be expected after a final victory of the anti-Bolsheviks. General Denikin's staff assured me that there was little likelihood of organized pogroms on a grand scale occurring. They considered that, in the event of their triumph, a period of private vendettas would ensue. There were hundreds of well-authenticated cases in which Red Commissars had done relatives of anti-Bolsheviks to death under the most cruel and revolting circumstances—circumstances so horrible that it is impossible for the world to measure the degree of guilt in terms of resentment against historical oppression. As relatives of the latter, who were fighting with Denikin, held all Red Commissars to be Jews, crimes of revenge against the Jews will be constant throughout the country for many years to come. The horror or injustice of pogroms never seemed to enter into the minds of my friends—they were under the complete control of a fierce and unreasoning hatred. If, as Russia finds its political feet, the swing of the pendulum ever puts a National Conservative Party in power, I fear that its advent to office will be signalized by the commission of excesses and massacres by its adherents.

The strong anti-Jewish prejudice which existed in the Volunteer Army was so manifest that I was not at all surprised at receiving a request late in September to attend at the British Military Mission for the purpose of talking over with General Holman the attitude which the English Press would take towards any accusations of fomenting or permitting pogroms which might be brought against Denikin in the near future. A letter of protest against organized outrages alleged to have been committed by Denikin's troops against Jews had been addressed to our High Commissioner at Constantinople by the representatives in Turkey of the Zionist Commitee. This effusion was signed by a Doctor J. Caleb. The High Commissioner had passed it to the British Government in London, and the chief of the British Military Mission in South Russia had been asked by Mr. Churchill to obtain General Denikin's explanation.

I should be inclined to term this protest from Turkey as a case of speculative anticipation. To my certain knowledge Denikin had all along laid it down, both to his senior officers and to his administrators, that any natural desire for vengeance or reprisals on the part of the men must be sternly repressed. That his instructions were being conscientiously observed I possessed the strongest evidence. After the occupation of Kieff³ by the Volunteer Army every effort was made, and with great success, to prevent unnecessary bloodshed. Later on I travelled along the Liski-Voronej front, and in no single town or village which had been conquered by Denikin's troops could I locate a sign or whisper of outrage. Denikin's attitude in the matter had, in fact, been so pronounced that murmurings against his alleged leniency and even weakness had been heard in his own Army for some time. The necessity for absolute unity of force and purpose in re-establishing Russia was so great, and the slackening of moral fibre and the want of self-control amongst all classes of the community as a consequence of their prolonged troubles was so pronounced, that the General found himself in a peculiar and appalling dilemma. He was in danger of being jockeyed by outside influences into the position of not being able to take definite public steps to stamp out anti-Jewish reprisals without running the grave risk of being accused by his men of weakness, or, worse still, of having it imputed to him that he was in the pay of the Hebrews.

That I am not wrong in placing the Jewish question in the forefront of Russia's problems was proved within a week of my conference with General Holman. Petloura,⁴ described by Denikin’s officers as a Ukrainian separatist, political mountebank, semi-brigand, anything you like, was manreuvring to prevent a victorious Volunteer Army re-incorporating the Ukraine in a new, big Russia. While posing as the enemy of Bolshevism he was really a foe to Denikin, and during the third week in September he allowed three Red brigades to march past his front for the purpose of attacking Denikin at Kieff.⁵ Petloura now instituted a recruiting campaign in the Ukraine, as he knew that his tactics might conceivably involve him in hostilities with either Denikin or the Reds, or both. It is known that he drew thousands of men to his banner by calling Denikin a pro-Jew, by stating that the Russian General was entirely in the hands of the Jews, and by preaching unabashed a holy crusade against the Semitic race.

[End selection]

*****

And that’s it! It really is crazy how many of these dysfunctional behaviors you see reoccurring: People insisting upon things that are obviously not true because their feelings are hurt, maximalist antisemites helping Jewish-led groups to attack perceived rivals, teachers being wastrels who want to destroy society, false claims of antisemitic outrages from Jewish groups enabling antisemites. Who knows how long people have been going through these motions?

You don’t have to agree with everything Hodgson says, I strongly disagree with him at points, but these memoirs really are an invaluable resource. I love reading about this period. I’m constantly surprised by how much I don’t know. There’s so much information out there that’s just lying around and can be found with a bit of digging.

I wish people would engage with these topics in greater depth and with more detachment. People are often just trying to ratify a pre-existing belief they have or looking for a little piece of trivia to deploy against someone else. That’s not how history works. If you approach these topics in that way, you’ll end up knowing less than nothing. It is obvious that the people who fixate on these topics the most know less than nothing.

1. [NOT INCLUDED IN THE ORIGINAL TEXT] These statistics float around a lot and are often attacked by critics as inaccurate and antisemitic. I don’t think that that was the author’s intent here. It’s tough to find reliable figures on this topic, I see different numbers all the time. Rather than quibbling over the exact percentage, I think everyone should just accept that it was “a lot” and that Jews were dramatically overrepresented among the Bolsheviks, particularly in political roles.

2. [NOT INCLUDED IN ORIGINAL TEXT] Claims about the role of Freemasonry in the Revolution seemed ridiculous to Hodgson because of his involvement in British Masonic lodges. I don’t know if they were involved (you shouldn’t assume that they were or weren’t), but if they were it appears that rank-and-file members wouldn’t have known about it. However, Russian Freemasonry did play an extensive role in the February Revolution (separate from the Bolshevik October Revolution). For more thorough coverage of this I recommend George Katkov’s Russia 1917 The February Revolution (1967). According to Katkov, Russian Freemasonry operated much differently than the British strain. Masonic “lodges” in Russia consisted of small groups of 5-10 political liberals who didn’t engage in the ceremonies or religious customs of their British and American counterparts beyond a vow of secrecy. Katkov claims that these small groups were extremely influential in the toppling of the Czar, as well as in later critical events like the Kornilov Affair. I’m not really knowledgeable about the history of Masonry in Russia or anywhere else so I can’t say whether or not this is true. Katkov’s book does paint the most comprehensive picture of the February Revolution that I’ve found yet, though.

3. [NOT INCLUDED IN ORIGINAL TEXT] Kiev

4. In November 1919, General Petloura was defeated by the Bolsheviks, and compelled to seek refuge abroad. In the centre of the Latin quarter of Paris he was, several years later, shot dead by a Jew who gave as his reason for the deed the dreadful pogroms Petloura carried out among his co-religionists.

5. [NOT INCLUDED IN ORIGINAL TEXT] Kiev