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March 1917? Then that easy and piquant temptation — to put all the blame on Jews, on their
ideas and actions, to see them as the main reason for these events — would easily skew the book
and overcome the readers, and divert the research away from the truly main causes of the
Revolution. And so in order to avoid the self-deception of the Russians, I persistently and
purposely downplayed the Jewish theme in The Red Wheel, relative to its actual coverage in the
press and on the streets in those days.
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The February Revolution was carried out by Russian hands and Russian foolishness. Yet
at the same time, its ideology was permeated and dominated by the intransigent hostility to the
historical Russian state that ordinary Russians didn’t have, but the Jews had. So the Russian
intelligentsia too had adopted this view. (This was discussed in Chapter 11). This intransigent
hostility grew especially sharp after the trial of Beilis, and then after the mass expulsion of Jews
in 1915. And so this intransigence overcame the moderation.
Yet the Executive Committee of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, which was formed
within hours of the Revolution, appears very different. This Executive Committee was in fact a
tough shadow government that deprived the liberal Provisional Government of any real power,
while at the same time, criminally refused to accept responsibility for its power openly. By its
Order No. 1, the Executive Committee wrested the power from the military and created support
for itself in the demoralized garrison of Petrograd. It was precisely this Executive Committee,
and not the judiciary, not the timber industrialists, not the bankers, which fast-tracked the
country to her doom. In the summer of 1917 Joseph Goldenberg, a member of the Executive
Committee, explained to the French Diplomat Claude Anet: “The Order No. 1 was not a mistake;
it was a necessity … the day we executed the Revolution, we realized that if we did not destroy
the old army, it would crush the Revolution. We had to choose between the army and the
Revolution, and we did not waver: we chose the latter, and we inflicted, I dare say, a brilliant
blow.” So there you have it. The Executive Committee quite purposely destroyed the army in the
middle of the war.
Is it legitimate to ask who were those successful and fatal-for-Russia leaders of the
Executive Committee? Yes, it is legitimate, when the actions of such leaders abruptly change the
course of history. And it must be said that the composition of the Executive Committee greatly
concerned the public and the newspapers in 1917, during which time many members of the
Committee concealed themselves behind pseudonyms from the public eye. Who was ruling
Russia? No one knew.
As it turned out, there were a dozen soldiers who were there just for show and weren’t
very bright. They were kept out of any real power or decision making. From the other thirty,
though, of those who actually wielded power, more than half were Jewish socialists. There were
also Russians, Caucasians, Latvians and Poles. Less than a quarter were Russians.
The moderate socialist V.B. Stankevich noted: “What really stuck out in the composition
of the Committee was the large foreign element … totally out of proportion to their part of the
population in Petrograd or the country in general.” Stankevich asks, “Was this the unhealthy
scum of Russian society? Or was this the consequence of the sins of the old regime, which by its
actions violently pushed the foreign element into the Leftist parties? Or was that simply the
result of free competition?” And then, there remains an open question — who bears more guilt
for this — the foreign born, who were there, or the Russians who could have been there but
weren’t?
For a socialist that might be a case to look for a guilty party. Yet wouldn’t it be better for
all — for us, for you, for them — to avoid sinking into that mad dirty torrent altogether?
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