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Llano Estacado
One cannot understand Russia without taking into consideration the complex Russian-Jewish relationships, spanning centuries. To do that we have, as Thomas Mann (Joseph und seine Bruder, 1933-1943) would have it, to look into the well of time. Let us start in 70 CE when Roman armies conquered Judea and dispersed its inhabitants into the four corners of the Earth. The Ashkenazim Jews are Israelites migrating northward and merged with the people living North of Judea. Sephardic Jews are Israelites migrating westward via Rome toward Spain and Portugal. The Libyan and Ethiopian Jews are descendants of Israelites migrating southward merged with the people of North Africa, and Persian Jews are descendant of Israelites migrating eastward merged with the people of the Middle East countries. The Jews-against-intermarriage minimize the intermarriage rate with the intent to enhance the racial purity, the anti-Semites maximize it with the intent to delegitimize the Jewish re-settlement of Judea. As well said by Isaac Asimov, in It's Been a Good Life (2002)
It's even possible that my ancestry might not move in the direction of ancient Israel at all. After 965, the Khazars were through as an organized power, but Judaism may have remained, and it may well be that many East European Jews are descended from Khazars and the people they ruled. I may be one of them. Who knows? And who cares?
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Khazar Empire
Khazars settled in Ashkenazia before the Armed Forces of the Roman Empire annihilated Judea (Kutschera (1910) Die Chasaren: Historische Studie) and dispersed its inhabitants. Those who traveled northward came to the land of Khazars via the Byzantine Empire. The Khazars had welcomed the Jews and later had been converted to Judaism. (Markowitz (1955) What You Should Know About Jewish Religion, History, Ethics and Culture.)|
Vladimir's Choice |
The Khazar Jews came to the court of Prince Vladimir and said:
'We have heard that Bulgarians (Muslims) and Christians came to teach you
their religion. We, however, believe in the one God of Abraham, Isaac, and
Jacob.'
Vladimir asked them: 'What kind of law do you have?' They answered: 'We are required to be circumcised, we may not eat pork or hare meat, and
we must observe the Sabbath.'
And he asked: 'Where is your land?' They answered: 'In Jerusalem.' And again he asked: 'It is really there?' They answered: 'God got angry with our fathers and therefore scattered us all over the world and gave our land to the Christians.'
Vladimir replied: 'How is it that you can teach people Jewish law even while God rejected you and scattered you. If God had loved you and your law, you would not be scattered throughout foreign lands. Or do you wish us Russians to suffer the same fate?
Vladimir also rejected Islam, (according to the Russian, tongue-in-cheek folklore as it prohibits drinking of alcoholic beverages), according to another version his decision was influenced by the girl he loved and accepted Christianity.
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The Pale of Settlement In 1016, the Allied Armies of the Rurik and Byzantine Empires defeated the Khazar Empire and brought it to a close. About that time, the Bulgarian Empire was also defeated and Bulgarians were resettled to the west coast of the Black Sea and Christianized. Khazars dispersed into the Empire of Rurik, however, most moved into the Pale of Settlement, the Llano Estacado (Staked Plains) of the Russian Empire. The Pale of Settlement was a semi-autonomous state with the population in 1820 of about 5.6 million. Most American Ashkenazim Jews came to the United States from the Pale of Settlement.
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According to Jacob Raisin (1913), the Pale of Settlement was the 'Jewish America of the Old World.' To the east the Pale of Settlement bordered with the Slavic speaking countries and to the west with the German speaking countries. Over the time, the Jewish population of the Pale of Settlement started to speak Yiddish, a German dialect written (from right to left) in the modified Hebrew characters.
The Wow
The communist movement in the Pale of Settlement (General Jewish Workers'
Union) was the first Marxist group in the Russian Empire with ideology
summarized by Shlomo Rappoport's (1902) Wow, excerpted as follows:
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Sound track Di Shvue (The Wow) Brider un shvester fun arbet un noyt Ale vos zaynen tsezeyt un tseshpreyt. Tsuzamen, tsuzamen, di fon zi iz greyt, Zi flatert fun tsorn, fun blut iz royt A shvue, a shvue oyf lebn un toyt.
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Bruder und Schwestern von Arbeit und Not ...
Brothers and sisters in work and misery, let's unite and swear that we'll strive for freedom and justice and that we'll fight against tyrants and their servants. In this struggle we'll either prevail over the forces of darkness and live, or, proud and brave, die in the battle.
We swear to fight those who rob and kill the poor; the ruling class, the corporations, the capitalists. We'll wage the holy war until right triumphs over wrong and the humble will be equal to the strong. Let our red flag help us to sustain our loyalty!
Roots the Russian communist movements can be traced to the General Jewish Workers' Union in the Pale of Settlements and to the Lenin's party. Communist movements in other countries also had their national and Jewish factions. Before gaining power, these two factions worked together. After gaining power, invariably, internal power struggle between those two factions ensued. In Russia, the national faction was headed by Joseph Djugashvili, (Communist party name Joseph Stalin, born in Georgia, Russia) and its Jewish faction by Lev Davydovich Bronstein (Communist party name Leon Trotsky, born in the Pale of Settlement).
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The Other Israel After the overthrow of the Romanov dynasty in 1917, the Pale of Settlement was incorporated into the Soviet Union and, in 1928, the Yidishe Avtonome Gegnt (Jewish Autonomous Region) was established as a secular alternative to the religious Zionist movement. Located in the basins of the Biro and Bidzhan rivers, tributaries of Amur which is navigable and connects the area with the China Sea, its area of 36,000 square kilometers is about the size of Holland and Belgium combined, 15,000 square kilometers larger that the area (20,770 square kilometers) of the present Israel. Life in this Jewish state was captured by the 1936 Pokrovsky's movie Seekers of Happiness with music by Isaak Dunayevsky, starring Mariya Blyumental and Venyamin Zuskin. The movie told the story of a Jewish family that fled the Great Depression in the United States to make a new life for itself in the new Jewish state of the Soviet Union. In 2003, Strom's documentary on creation of the Jewish Autonomous Region L'Chayim Comrade Stalin premiered at the Berlin Film Festival.
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The capital of the Jewish Autonomous region located north of the Chinese border is Birobidzhan with Harbin, capital of the Chinese Heilongjiang province, not far away.
One may only guess what the world would look today if instead locating Israel in the region which is the world's largest armament market, about 15 times the world average, and instead extracting billions of dollars from the United States on behalf of security of a theocratic state surrounded by enemies, the Zionist movement embraced Premier Stalin's blueprint for a secular Jewish state in the Pacific Rim, experiencing phenomenal economic growth, and surrounded by states traditionally either friendly or neutral to the Jewish community.
Russian Jewry and Joseph Stalin Throughout his life, Joseph Stalin vacillated between philo- and anti- Semitism, as some Jews were among the ardent supporters of the socialist Soviet Union and some among its most implacable enemies. Toward the end of his life, he perceived the resurgence of Russian Jewry, following the establishment of Israel. He was afraid that, before the Soviet Union will be able to achieve a nuclear parity, the United States will carry on a preemptive nuclear strike at the Soviet Union and that the sizable Jewish minority within the Soviet Union will support the American invasion (cf., Gerson, 2007).
 B-17 Stratofortress |
Chutzpah of Rudolf Slansky Premier Stalin was reinforced in this belief when when he learned that, at a height of the Cold War, the Jewish group within the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia opened Czechoslovak military airports to American B-17 Fortresses stationed in West Germany. As described by Colonel Benjamin Kagan in his 1960 article in Biton Chel Ha’aveer, after rearming at the Czechoslovakia's military airports, the B-17 stratofortresses carried on bombing missions of Cairo, Gaza Strip, and El-Arish. After the Czech government realized that this was happening, twelve members of the Jewish faction of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, led by Rudolf Slansky, a personal friend of the President of Czechoslovakia, Klement Gottwald, were accused of treason and given a death penalty. Klement Gottwald, despite the friendship of his and Slansky's families, did not pardon neither Rudolf Slansky nor the other conspirators, and they and were executed in December, 1952.
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Assassination of Stalin and his friend Fifty years after Joseph Stalin's death, suspicions that he was poisoned begin to appear. According to Alison Schmauch (The Dartmouth, April 28, 2003), the executive editor of Yale University Press Jonathan Brent asserted during his speech at the Dartmouth college that
'...far from dying a natural death, Soviet
dictator Josef Stalin
was murdered for his anti-American and anti-Jewish
stance.'
After examining recently released medical records on Stalin's death, a group of physicians at Yale Medical School concluded that Stalin likely died of warfarin poisoning. Warfarin is odorless and flavorless poison that thins the blood vessels and causes strokes and hemorrhages.
After the Premier Stalin's death, his close political ally Klement Gottwald, President of Czechoslovakia, left Prague for Moscow to attend Stalin's funeral. He appeared to be in perfect health. On his return from the Soviet Union he looked gravely ill and died 9 days later. The cause mortis on his death certificate is listed as a burst artery in his heart. The time interval between the administration of a lethal dose of warfarin and the time of death is about 6 -12 days.
Stuart Kahan, a close relative of Lazar Kaganovich, who interviewed him close to his death, describes the assassination of Joseph Stalin in his book The Wolf of the Kremlin: Biography of Lazae Dr M. Kaganovich (1987) as follows:
Bulganin, Molotov, Voroshilov, and Lazar Kaganovich left Stalin’s dacha late that night. Besides Molotov, Voroshilov had married a woman of Jewish extraction, Lazar himself was a Jew and Bulganin had been strongly in favor of the recognition of Israel. There was no question what had to be done. “He is taking the drug dicoumarol, intended to retard the clotting of the blood” Lazar said. Molotov was quick to react. “I know the substance. It’s rat poison.” “Precisely” Lazar answered. “But in its proper dosage, it is an anticoagulant. The dosage can be increased to twenty milligrams instead of five. The tablets are unscored. He will never be able to tell the difference.”
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Is Communism Jewish? Instead of asking whether Stalin was philo- or anti- Semitic, a more pertinent question appears to be 'Is Communism Jewish?' Numerous writers on the right end of the political spectrum asserted that the Communism is Jewish. Is it? For many years, the role of the Jewish faction in the creation of the Soviet Union was stressed and, in the United States, the Democratic Party appeared to be associated with generous Jewish contributors and influential Jewish intellectuals. Observations of numerous sociologists that
the spirit of capitalism is essentially
the
spirit of Judeo-Protestantism
Soviet Union and its allies were among the few
countries
where Jews did not dominated the economy
and analyses of the philosophy of Karl Marx with respect to religion were mostly ignored. However, around the beginning of the 21 Century, the United States' Jewish lobby, Jewish intellectuals and media moguls switched their allegiance and associated themselves with the extreme right of the Republican Party and its Judeo-Protestant constituency. These events were results of confluence of many factors, however, the phenomenological analysis of the shifting alliances during the existence of the Soviet Union and after its downfall supports the notion that association of the Judaist factions with the right-left polarities of the political spectrum is ultimately determined by religious factors.
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Golden Years of the Soviet Union With the passage of time, for most citizens of the Soviet Union religion ceased to be a factor in their lives. The Soviet Union fulfilled the prophecy and vision of Karl Marx that abolishment of religion and more equal division of wealth will result in a better society. Instead of preaching against prostitution, prostitution disappeared as the poverty disappeared. In Soviet Union, there were no lawyers, no income taxes, no unemployment, no credit card debts, health care, hospitals and hospices were free for all, dental care and prescription medication was free, old folks homes were free, maternity leaves were the paid leaves gradually stretched to several years, the retirement income was guaranteed to all and the retirement age decreased, cost of consumer goods was stable or decreasing, school lunches and textbooks were free, there were no tuition fees, no advertisement on television, no homeless, public transportation was available and affordable, illegal drug use was next to nonexistent. When we say free, we mean accessible to all, as the collective wealth of the society paid for these expenses, i.e., things deemed as necessary for normal, ordinary life were accessible to all. However, the ideal of equality also meant that things not accessible to all were not accessible This included aside of luxury items, also the foreign travel. This uniformity was the source of discontent for those who believed that in a capitalist system they would be the privileged. Also, the censorship of information deemed inimical and foreign books and films deemed pornographic or violent created filters through which the capitalist society appeared better than it was in reality. These factors, together with the reemergence of monotheistic religions toward the end of the Soviet Union, played major role in its disintegration and violence that followed.
 Division of Russia's Resources (1992-1999) |
and beyond ... Thayer Watkins at the Economic Department of San Jose State University in his Russian Oligarchs of the 1990's writes:
There were some individuals who became so immensely rich in the privatization of the assets of the Soviet system that they became known as the oligarchs. Their names are Boris Berezovsky, Vladimir Gusingky, Mikhail Khodorovsky, Alexander Smolensky, Vladimitr Potanin, Vladimir Vinogradov, Mikhail Friedman.
During the Yeltsin's administration (1992-1999), the "oligarchs" acquired through violence, theft, corruption and murder about 65 percent of Russia's resources, from its oil and the auto industries to (together with Rupert Murdoch) the mass media. This was one of the factors determining the sharp decrease in the quality of life of a majority of the populace after the Fall of the Soviet Union. During the Yeltsin's years, the GNP of Russia dropped over 50% leaving large segments of the population destitute while her nouveaux riches transferred their wealth abroad (cf., Klebnikov, 2000). All oligarchs save one have significant ties to Israel, Great Britain and the United States, this being among the factors of an increase in Russia's antagonism to these countries.
See Also
Heaven on Earth
The wolves are closing in
References
Gerson, J. (2007) Empire and the Bomb. University of Michigan Press.
Kahan, S. (1987) The Wolf of the Kremlin: The First Biography of L.M.
Kaganovich, the Soviet Union's Architect of Fear. William Morrow.
Klebnikov, P. (2000) Godfather of the Kremlin: Boris Berezovsky and the
Looting of Russia, Harcourt.
