Was the Russian Revolution Jewish?

A hundred years after the Bolsheviks swept to power, historians and contemporaries still struggle to understand the prominent role played by Jews.

Some observers saw Lenin and his band as a motley group of Jewish revolutionaries. Alexander Guchkov, the Russian minister of war in the Russian Provisional Government after Tsar Nicholas II abdicated in March 1917, told the British military attaché General Alfred Knox that “the extreme element consists of Jews and imbeciles.” Lenin’s train had included 19 members of his Bolshevik party, several of his allies among the Mensheviks and six Jewish members of the Jewish Labor Bund. Almost half the passengers on the train were Jewish.

The role of Jews in the Russian Revolution, and by extension Communism writ large, has always been a sensitive subject because antisemitic voices often painted Soviet Communism as a Jewish plot, or “Jewish Bolshevism.” When Alexander Solzhenitsyn began work on a book called 200 Years Together, he was criticized for what touching this taboo issue. His own comments to the press didn’t help the matter, claiming two-thirds of the Cheka (secret police) in Ukraine were Jewish.

Winston Churchill agreed. In a piece in the Illustrated Sunday Herald in 1920, he broadly stereotyped Jews as either “international” communists, loyal nationalists or Zionists. He called it the “struggle for the soul of the Jewish people” and claimed the Jewish role in the Russian Revolution “probably outweighs [the role] of all others. With the notable exception of Lenin, the majority of the leading figures are Jews.”

The Jerusalem Post, 2017