![]() Part of that motif is tied up in Trotsky’s Jewishness and the larger number of Jewish revolutionaries, activists and followers who were attracted to Communism in the late 19th century. ![]() But people shouldn’t think that if Trotsky had won and not Stalin, things would have been better, because they wouldn’t have been.” The question of “what might have been” is uniquely tied to Trotsky because he often symbolized the anti-Stalinist, the wild revolutionary with global impulses and intellectual imagination, as opposed to the doer and statist Stalin with his murderous purges. He’s the archetypal 20th-century revolutionary. Producer Konstantin Ernst told the Guardian, “I think he combines everything, good and evil, injustice and bravery. In Russia, a new series looks at Leon Trotsky. The 2016 Spanish film The Chosen follows Ramon Mercader, the assassin of Leon Trotsky, and this year’s British film The Death of Stalin turns that event into something of a comedy. A hundred years after the Russian Revolution, there is nostalgia and renewed interest in those figures who led it and the tragedies it unleashed. Even though Lenin often praised Jews in his circle, his wife Nadezhda Krupskaya’s own Reminiscences of Lenin (1933) sought to remove these touchy subjects in line with Soviet policy. The reason for this is complicated and tied up with notions of antisemitism as well as attempt by the revolutionaries themselves to whitewash their ethnic and religious differences. A recent article in The New Yorker about “Lenin and the Russian Spark,” chronicling 100 years since the journey, entirely discounts the Jewish aspect of the revolutionaries. Catherine Merridale’s recent Lenin on the Train doesn’t delve into the preponderance of Jews. Almost half the passengers on the train were Jewish. 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. Some observers saw Lenin and his band as a motley group of Jewish revolutionaries. Half a year later Lenin and some of his cohorts would be running a new state, the Russian Soviet Republic. The leader was Vladimir Lenin, and he was taking his small group by sealed train for a weeklong journey that would end at Finland Station in St. Eventually their shouting angered the leader of the group, who poked his head into their berth and scolded them. The vivacious French feminist Inessa Armand sang and cracked jokes with Radek, Ravich and Safarov. Grigory Useivich from Ukraine was accompanied by his wife Elena Kon, the daughter of a Russian woman named Khasia Grinberg. There was the half-Armenian Georgii Safarov and his wife as well as Marxist activist Sarah “Olga” Ravich. On board was Karl Radek from Lvov in what is now Ukraine, and Grigory Zinoviev and his wife, Zlata, also from Ukraine. Their names would have been known in left-wing and revolutionary circles of the time, so some traveled under aliases. The “Russians” were an eclectic group, including 10 women and two children. Two German soldiers boarded the passenger cars and separated the Russians from the rest, moving them to second- and third-class berths. Then the train shuffled in to Gottmadingen on the German side of the border. The passengers were exceeding the legal limit on importation of goods. There was a group of 32 Russians on board and the customs officials confiscated chocolate and sugar from them. On April 9, 1917, a train pulled into a station at Thayngen, a Swiss town on the German border. NOTE! Consider delaying until first div on page If (slot) slot.addService(googletag.pubads()) ![]() (function (a, d, o, r, i, c, u, p, w, m) Was the Russian Revolution Jewish? - The Jerusalem Post
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