Behind the Headlines Anti-semitism May Replace Marxism-leninism As Official Soviet Creed

Anti-Semites in the Soviet Communist Party have now become so powerful that they are openly proposing to make anti-Semitism rather than Marxism-Leninism the official creed of the Soviet Union. Some of them also propose a “final solution” of the Jewish problem in terms reminiscent of Hitler before his rise to power.

This is the theme of the cover article in the latest issue of the New Statesman, the respected left wing British weekly, by Reuben Ainsztein, an authority on Soviet affairs and author of a massive study of Jewish resistance under the Holocaust. Ainsztein’s 6000-word study of what he calls the Soviet Union’s “new right” is illustrated by a full page montage of the faces of Stalin and Hitler.

The article begins by claiming that anti-Semitism is already the “official doctrine” of the Soviet armed forces and that “what unites the Russian new right is anti-Semitism and a racial fear of China.”

According to Ainsztein, the USSR’s new right consists of five or six groups inside the system which complain that they are unequally represented in the leadership of the Communist Party and the government. It also embraces the dissident right, ranging from followers of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to the outright fascists, whose chief spokesmen are Ivan Shevtsov, Gennady Shimanov and Valery Yemelyanov.

While Solzhenitsyn wears the mantle of the 19th Century novelist Dostoyevsky, Shimanov and Shevtsov “see the West as ruled by the dark forces of Zionism and satanism,” and Yemelyanov sees it in the hands of the Judaeo-Masons, who are getting ready to become “the masters of the earth in the year 2000.” Shimanov is quoted as arguing that the Soviet state is “the only defense the world has against the satanic forces of Zionism.”

NOT A LUNATIC FRINGE

Ainsztein claims that to reject the Soviet Union’s new right as a lunatic fringe “is to repeat the mistakes of the liberal and decent people all over Europe who in the 1920s and 1930s refused to take Hitler and the Nazis seriously.”

He adds: “The fascist elements of the dissident right have champions not only on the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party but in the Politburo itself. Their chief spokesman in the Politburo appears to have been Dmitry Polyansky, who in 1970 looked like ousting (Alexei) Kosygin from his post of prime minister.” His personal intervention led to the publication in the same year of Shevtsov’s two anti-Semitic novels that could have come straight out of Julius Streicher’s pornographic imagination.

Shevtsov’s first novel, “In the Name of the Father and the Son,” appeared in March 1970 where 65,000 copies were sold in two days. It claimed that world Jewry, led by Zionists, controlled American imperialism and that Zionism was “secretly infiltrating all the life cells of all the countries in the world, undermining from within all that is strong, healthy and partiotic.” The agents of Zionism inside the Communist Party, the greatest of whom was “Judas Trotsky,” were working to destroy it.

In Shevtsov’s second novel, issued this year by the Soviet Defense Ministry publishing house in three editions of 200,000 copies each, the villain is a Jew called Nahum Hotzer, a Moscow journalist and playwright who is a pervert, sadist, drug peddler and murderer. To get his mother’s money, he kills her and wraps her own intestines round her head. The book’s Aryan Russian hero, a scientist, is murdered by Jewish scientists who reveal the secrets of Soviet nuclear power to the Americans.

Although on July 12, Pravda attacked Shevtsov’s novels as “ideologically vicious and artistically weak,” this did not stop them from being reprinted and made compulsory reading for the Soviet armed forces, Ainsztein says.

ANOTHER ‘MILESTONE’ CITED

Another “milestone” in the legalization of the Soviet fascist right was the publication of Valery Skurlotov’s book, “Zionism and Apartheid,” by the Ukrainian political publishing house in 1975, which argues that “the racist conception of Judaism has provided the prototype for European racism.” Evidence that the Soviet new right wants a “final solution of the Jewish problem” is found by Ainsztein in the secret memorandum presented to the 25th Soviet Communist Party congress in 1975, a partial text of which reached Israel early this year.

Its author is Yemelyanov, a well-known ideological lecturer. The memorandum claims “that the Jewish Masonic order, B’nai B’rith, is the visible top of the invisible international Judaeo-Masonic pyramid ruling the non-Communist world and influencing Soviet policies through its agents inside the USSR.”

To deal with the Jewish menace, Yemelyanov proposes: “The creation of a world-wide anti-Zionist and anti-Masonic front on the model of the anti-fascist fronts of the 1930s and 1940s because the threat of Zionist rule over the world planned for the year 2000 threatens all the gentiles on our earth irrespective of their race, religion and party affiliation.”

THE DANGER TO SOVIET JEWS

Like Hitler, “Yemelyanov does not spell out in detail how he proposes to eliminate the Jewish menace. But he argues throughout his memorandum that Soviet Jews must not be expelled or allowed to leave, for those who go to Israel reinforce the potential of a fascist state, while the others who emigrate to the United States or other Western countries reinforce the Judaeo-Masonic pyramid.

“To the Soviet Party leaders and officials who have read his memorandum it is therefore clear that he wants at least a final solution on the lines planned by Stalin in the last months of his life….Such a solution is impossible while (Soviet President Leonid) Brezhnev is successfully holding together the Soviet establishment.”

However, the danger to Soviet Jews is particularly grave because “just as the Nazis managed to combine a boundless hatred of Jews with their plans to enslave and exterminate the Slavs, the Russian neo-Nazis see the extermination of the Jews as part of a war against China.”