The Bolshevik Coup d'Etat: The Dream of the World Commune
On June 28, 1914, when my mother was 16 years old, Gavrilo Princip shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, in Sarajevo. It was the day that marked the end of the "old world." I have not checked whether Nostradamus predicted it, but what followed was truly apocalyptic. Four empires collapsed—the Reich of the German Kaiser, the Habsburg dual monarchy, the Ottoman sultanate, and, not least, the giant fief of the Romanovs.
The events that heralded and followed the fall of the Tsarist Empire dragged both Latvians and Jews into the whirlwind. Ironically, many members of both groups gained a kind of Herostratic fame in this horrific storm, deservedly or not.
Let us start with the Great Flight (beglu laiki in Latvian). World War I dragged on, and in the spring of 1915, the German army invaded Kurland. The retreating Russian army forced many civilians near the front to flee to the east and the northeast. Others fled voluntarily, in fear of
"German barbarians." Thousands of Latvians in Kurland abandoned their homes and fields to embark on an unknown, far-flung odyssey. It took them first to Vidzeme (Livonia) and later far into the depths of Russia proper. Of more than 800,000 inhabitants in Kurland, some 400,000, that is, half, left their homes. Later, the total number of Latvian refugees reached 700,000.
Latvians felt bitter hatred toward the Germans, more precisely, toward their German landlords, the Baltic barons. Kaiser Wilhelm's offensive into Kurland promised no good. The Baltic barons did not hide their hopes to annex the entire Baltic region to Germany, or at least turn it into a grand duchy, a protectorate, They envisioned importing thousands of German settlers, especially to Kurland. Thus, Latvians, who in 1905 had risen against both the German landlords and the tsarist autocracy, ten years later saw Russia as the lesser evil. They volunteered in large numbers for special battalions in the Russian army, the Latvian Riflemen's Battalions. The commander of the Russian army's northwestern front gave the order for these battalions to be formed on August 1, 1915, a year after the outbreak of the war. As we shall see, it was an order that changed world history.
The attitude of Baltic Jews toward these two warring powers was quite different than that of the Latvians, although to a degree the effect was the same, in that many Jews were also forced to become refugees. Jews did not care for the deeply anti-Semitic ruling classes in Russia, which had carried out vicious pogroms, prevented Jews from settling freely within the empire (restricting them to the sort of giant ghetto, the Pale of Settlement), kept a numerus clausus against Jews in higher education, and so on. Jews understandably felt no respect or affection, much less patriotism, toward Nicholas II and his court. Also, the Ob. Ost (Eastern Areas) administration of the German-occupied territories of Russia was much more humane toward Jews than the tsar's uradniks, pristavs, and gendarmes had ever been, not to mention the Cossacks. Thus, to the Jews, the German Reich of the kaiser seemed somewhat more civilized and was considered the lesser evil.
Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolayevich, the army's chief of staff, knew well what Jews thought of the Tsarist Empire. Without much ado, he proclaimed all Jews to be traitors and spies and ordered their expulsion from a region within 50 versts (33 miles) of the front. In Kurland, this order uprooted 40,000 Jews at the end of April and early May of 1915. In all, 75 per cent of the Jews living on Latvian soil were forced to abandon their homes during the war. For Jews, as well as Latvians, the First World War meant the Great Flight, which was even less voluntary than for the Latvians.
In 1916, the eight Latvian Riflemen's Battalions were reorganized as regiments. They fought against the Germans with extreme valor and self-sacrifice. There were harsh battles along the shores of the Daugava, especially around Christmas 1916, and on several occasions the
Latvians saved Russian army units on the same sector of the front from defeat. The Latvians proved themselves to be exemplary, disciplined, and steel-hard warriors. They became the elite troops of the tsarist army.
The winter of 1916-17 ended with the revolt in St. Petersburg that toppled the autocratic regime, and Tsar Nicholas II was forced to abdicate. The new Provisional Government lifted all restrictions on Jews and promised autonomy to non-Russian peoples. Soon, the attitude of both Jews and Latvians changed sharply.
New times began. To paraphrase the motto on the flag of one of the Riflemen's regiments, "A Blood-Stained Sun Rises." Erosion of morale set in among Russian army troops after the February revolution in 1917, and thousands deserted from the front. Only the Latvian Riflemen maintained discipline and their reputation of prowess in combat.
In April of 1917, the Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin (Ulianov) returned from Swiss exile to St. Petersburg. The Germans had allowed him and several comrades, including Zinoviev (Apfelbaum), to pass through Germany in a sealed railway car and even gave them money to promote subversive activities in Russia. In May, the energetic revolutionary Lev Trotsky (Bronstein) returned to Russia from the United States.
Bolshevik agitators in the Russian army tried especially hard to get the army's best soldiers, the Latvian Riflemen, to back their cause. This largely succeeded, mainly because the Riflemen were still angry that the incompetent tsarist military leadership had left them to their fate during the Christmas battles of 1916, costing many Latvian lives. Also, many Riflemen were sons of landless agrarian workers who believed the Bolsheviks' promises to carry out radical land reform when they came to power. The Baltic barons' great estates would be divided, giving land "to those who work the land." In the wake of the events of 1905, there were many Marxist sympathizers among the Riflemen, who thought that Bolshevik demagoguery represented the "highest and purest form" of this teaching. In addition, these young Latvians were patriots from a small country, who at the same time were internationalists to a considerable degree, well acclimatized to living in the vast stretches of Russia and meeting people of different nationalities both in everyday life and in the trenches.
The Bolsheviks promised national self-determination for all peoples in the Russian Empire. Visions were raised of the proletarians of a free Latvia joining with the working masses of a free Finland, a free Poland, and a free Caucasus in an offensive against the "old, rotting world." They would soon be joined by the workers of France and Germany, then by the "enslaved millions" of China and India. Before too long there would be a "world commune" based on absolute justice.
Of course, not every Latvian Rifleman thought of the future in these terms, but their overall attitude was euphoric, and Red propaganda was a major factor in the rapid Bolshevization of these troops. Not only the Riflemen themselves but also most of their officers embraced the Bolshevik cause, among them the highly talented Jukums Vacietis. Vacietis became commander in chief of all Soviet Russian military forces after the Bolshevik coup in S t. Petersburg (the so-called Great Socialist October Revolution). Some officers did not go over to the Bolshevik cause: Fridrichs Briedis, shot by the Bolsheviks in 1918; Karlis Goppers, shot by the Bolsheviks in 1941; Colonel P. Dardzans, who died recently in Chicago.
The second All-Russian Congress of Soviets met in St. Petersburg on November 7, 1917 (October 25 old style), the day of the coup. The American journalist John Reed, present as an observer, relates a speech by delegate Karlis Petersons, a representative of the Latvian Riflemen, who in 1918 became commander of the Red Army's Latvian Division and a member of the Revolutionary Tribunal of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee. According to Reed (Ten Days that Shook the World, New York, The Modem Library, 1960, p. 130), Petersons concluded his rousing speech with the following words:
I tell you now, the Lettish [Latvian] soldiers have said many times, "No more resolutions' No more talk! We want deeds -- the Power must be in our hands! "Let these impostor dele gates [who opposed the Bolshevik coup] leave the Congress! The Army is not with them!
And John Reed remarks, "The hall rocked with cheering."
Indeed, the Latvian Red Riflemen were in fact the strongest pillar supporting the Bolsheviks. They were the Bolsheviks' Praetorian guard. As the Latvian historian Uldis Germanis, who lives in Stockholm, points out (in Oberst Vacietis und die Lettischen Schuetzen im Weltkrieg und in der Oktoberrevolution, Stockholm, Amqvist & Wiksell, 1974), Lenin could rely on neither the disorganized Russian troops in St. Petersburg, nor the famous sailors at Kronstadt with their growing anarchistic tendencies, nor the militarily weak Red Guard, composed of workers. The Bolshevik headquarters in St. Petersburg, the Smolny Institute building, which contained Lenin's office, were guarded by a special company of Latvian Riflemen (officially called Svodnoya rota Latyshskich Strelkov pri VCIK i Sovnarkome). When the Soviet government moved to Moscow in March of 1918, these faithful bodyguards of the Bolshevik leadership, now known as the United Latvian Riflemen's Battalion, were assigned to guard the Kremlin.
Here it would be appropriate to recall the White Russian émigré saying mentioned in the introduction: "What destroyed Russia? Jewish brains, Latvian bayonets, and Russian stupidity." Making no judgment about Russian stupidity and having looked at the role of the Latvian bayonets, let us turn to the matter of Jewish brains.
The historian Walter Laqueur, who lives in Britain, states that during Hitler's formative years he (Hitler) was greatly influenced by the Baltic German Alfred Rosenberg, who grew up in Estonia and studied in Riga. Rosenberg was the theoretician of National Socialism who convinced the future German Fuhrer that Bolshevism and Jewry were one and the same (die Vorstetllung von der Austauschbarkeit von Bolschewismus un Judentum). This misconception found wide support, one must admit, not only among German Nazis and Russian reactionaries, but also among certain Latvian right-wing extremists, who even in 1987 claim "Jews are communists."
However, as the Russians say, there is no smoke without fire. In the interests of historical accuracy one must acknowledge that Jews, like Latvians, played a major role in the early years of Bolshevism's "Great Experiment," that is, between 1917 and 1937. This is indicated graphically in the memoirs, published abroad, of the well-known Russian poet Marina Zvetayeva, who remembers how amazed she was that in 1918 in Moscow, everywhere, in every institution, there were "only Yids and Latvians." All Moscow, she complained, was swarming with them.
That hardly means that all Jews in the Russian Empire stood behind the Bolsheviks. A majority of the Bund opposed the Reds, as did several influential Zionist organizations, Jewish religious leaders -- the rabbinate, and the wealthier classes such as industrialists and big merchants. In the summer of 1918, the attempted assassination of Lenin was carried out by a Jewish woman. Fanny Kaplan, and the Left Socialist Revolutionary (SR) revolt against the Bolsheviks was led by the Jew Blumkin, among others.
Still, the fact is that the role of Jewish revolutionaries among the Bolsheviks during the civil war and the twenties was very large. One has only to name a few names to make that clear: Lev Trotsky; Grigori Zinoviev, first president of the Communist International; Yagoda, head of the secret police; Kamenev, Radek, Sverdlov, Joffe, Yakir. Thousands of young Jews joined the Bolsheviks after they became convinced that White Russian forces, Cossacks, Ukrainian insurgents, and other armed opponents of Bolshevism were organizing pogroms in the finest tradition of Orthodox Mother Russia's anti-Semitism. This persecution, looting, and killing drove Jews over to the Bolshevik side. An additional factor, to be sure, was the hunger for power and respect, the possibility of at long last holding positions of authority and responsibility in revolutionary power bodies. There was also a desire for vengeance against "reactionaries" for earlier injustices against Jews, and last but not least, the aforementioned romantic dream of the dawning "world commune," the Utopian "new world order."
Among the prominent Jewish Bolsheviks were commissars and Chekists who were members of Baltic Jewish families. For example, the Riga Jew M. Gruzenberg-Borodin in the twenties was the Kremlin's emissary to China and worked as chief adviser to the Kuomintang nationalist government. Also, the Latvian Jew Jacob Rappoport was one of the founders of the Gulag. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (The Gulag Archipelago, New York, Harper & Row, 1975, v.2, p. 83) mentions that Rappoport, while a student at Tartu (Dorpat, or Jurjev), was evacuated to Voronezh, where he later become deputy head of the provincial Cheka and then deputy head of construction of the White Sea-Baltic Canal, built with slave labor.
In this connection I would like to quote a letter from my late father, Joseph (Jazeps) Gordon, sent September 29, 1974, from Haifa to Tel Aviv:
When I was last visiting you, I leafed through the book The Gulag Archipelago and came upon the picture of my old schoolmate, Rappoport. I want to tell you the following story, which is not a fairy tale, but the truth.
Men's Fates
In the summer of 1915, when the German army was closing in on Riga, schools were evacuated to the Russian interior. I was then in the last grade of high school. We were told that our German teacher, an ethnic German, was working at the technical high school in Voronezh. Since I had a relative there, a refugee from Jelgava (Mitau), I moved to Voronezh for the school year 1915-16. At the time there were many refugees in Voronezh, Jews from Kurland and Lithuania, who had been forcibly exiled to the Russian interior by the anti-Semitic, reactionary Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolayevich. To my surprise, I met two schoolmates, Rappoport and Gorfinkel, who had also come to complete their schooling in Voronezh. They had rented a small room together, where they lived as the best of friends, under one roof, sharing the same blanket.
When the school year ended, we each went our separate ways. Gorfinkel returned to Riga. He knew Hebrew. While in Voronezh, he had participated in Jewish youth meetings (vetcherinkas) held on Jewish holidays. When the Hebrew High School was founded in independent Latvia, he became its director. He held that job until 1940. Just before the outbreak of the German-Soviet war, he was deported for being a Zionist, to a faraway place in Siberia. He never returned.
Rappoport went from Voronezh to Moscow. When the revolution broke out, he joined the Bolsheviks and started to work for Dzerzhinsky's organization [the state police]. He evidently worked faithfully and well, because during the forties he became the prosecutor for the MGB [the Ministry of State Security] in Moscow. I found out in Riga from a former schoolmate that Rappoport died a few years ago, holding the rank of general. As for myself, I was drafted into the army after finishing technical high school. During Kerensky's time I became a Junker cadet, that is, one of the bitterest enemies of Bolshevism.
I think this family letter bears witness to the times.
But let us return to the Latvians who were active in the Bolshevist seizure and consolidation of power. In St. Petersburg, Peteris Stucka, Martins Lacis and Jekabs Peterss were members of the committee that prepared the Bolshevik coup. Ivars Smilga agitated for the Bolsheviks among Russian army units in Finland. The seaman E. Bergs led an attack by Russian marines on the Winter Palace, site of the Provisional Government. In Moscow the Bolshevik uprising was led by Lieutenant O. Berzins; chief of staff of the Red Guards was J. Piece.
The Latvian Riflemen's regiments of the Red Army, later united as the "Latdivision," participated in all the crucial battles of the Russian civil war, especially in the Ukraine and in storming the fortified zone at Perekop, which blocked the way to the Crimea. The Red Army's victories are unthinkable without the Latvian Riflemen. As the Russian communist poet Demyan Bedny (Pridvorov) wrote at the time, "Any flank is secure if Latvians are there! (Ljubyje flangi obespetcheni, kogda na flangach latyshi.)" It is a proven fact that the Riflemen saved the Bolshevik regime in July 1918, when the Left SR revolt broke out and the lives of Lenin, Trotsky, and Dzerzhinsky were hanging by a thread. As mentioned in the introduction, the protection of important buildings and persons in Moscow, especially in the Kremlin, was entrusted to the Latvian Riflemen. The famous Latvian military leader Jukums Vacietis and his men restored order in Moscow. As J. Porietis records in his book Strelnieku legendaras gaitas (The Riflemen's legendary deeds, Lincoln, Nebraska, 1966), units of Latvians smashed anti-Bolshevik rebellions in other cities as well -- the Third Regiment in Kaluga, the Fifth Regiment in Bologoye, the Sixth Regiment in St. Petersburg (Petrograd), the Seventh Regiment in Staraya Russa and St. Petersburg, the Eighth Regiment in Vologda and Yaroslav, and so on. Furthermore, the father of Soviet military aviation was the Latvian Jekabs Alksnis.
Along with Jews and Poles such as Dzerzhinsky and Menzhinsky, Latvians played a role in forming that fearsome instrument of Red terror, the Cheka. George Leggett notes this in his book The Cheka, Lenin's Political Police 1917-1922 (Oxford 1981). He quotes Trotsky as saying at a Politburo meeting on April 18,1918, that Latvians and Jews comprised the largest percentages of the Cheek's employees at the front, in the rear, and in Soviet institutions in the center. Jekabs Peterss, who was a close associate of the founder of the Cheka, Dzerzhinsky, and Martins Lacis-Sudrabs, who was the theoretician of the Red terror, were the most monstrous of the Latvian Chekists. The British journalist Reginald 0. G. Urch, who was well-versed in Baltic and Soviet affairs, mentions Lacis-Sudrabs in his book The Rabbit King of Russia (London 1939). Urch cites an article by Lacis-Sudrabs in which he wrote: "The Central Executive Committee has abolished the Cheka, but it has created and placed on duty a new sentinel -- the GPU. The Cheka has done its work.... And you, the new sentinel, be alert"
In the twenties and thirties, Latvians continued to be active in the Soviet Union's political police and intelligence service. The creator of Soviet spy networks in the West was Berzins, who was also the supervisor and mentor of the famous spy Richard Sorge. Another Berzins supervised the slave labor camp system at Kolyma, the Dal'stroy, which was the Soviet predecessor to and equivalent of Auschwitz.
Solzhenitsyn remarks in The Gulag Archipelago: "The Estonians and Lithuanians are close to my own soul.... They never harmed anyone, lived quietly, in good conditions, morally more honestly than we. As it turned out, they were guilty of living next to us and cutting us off from the sea.... As for Latvians, my attitude is somewhat more complicated. There is an element of fate. It was they, after all, who started the whole thing."
Solzhenitsyn is emotionally biased. He cannot forget the Latvian bayonets.
In 1920, two years after Latvia became independent, Soviet Russia renounced all claims to Latvian territory "for all rime." A repatriation action was undertaken, and the great majority of Latvian and Jewish refugees, including the Riflemen, returned to Latvia. Only about 60-70,000 of those who had left during the war years stayed in the Soviet Union. To that figure one must add about 180-190,000 Latvian settlers, who had gone to various areas of Russia, including Siberia, before and just after the turn of the century.
The leaders of this community were about 12,000 Latvian communists -- former Riflemen's officers and commissars, political workers, activists. As mentioned earlier, many of them took leading posts in the Cheka, the Red Army, and other institutions. Latvians such as Fiche and Eidemanis consolidated the Soviet regime in the Crimea and Central Asia, and also in Yakutia and other regions of Siberia. The Latvian communists in Russia had their own cultural and educational organization "Prometheus," their own cooperatives and presses, schools and theaters, newspapers, a literature and art journal Celtne. The exile community of Red Latvians was secure in its national-cultural autonomy.
Unfortunately, Stalin's Great Purge started to affect this community at the end of 1936. In two years all Latvian organizations -- cooperatives and presses, schools and theaters, newspapers and journals -- were closed. Thousands of Latvians were shot, from Chekists and high Red Army commanders to teachers and writers. Thousands were imprisoned in the Gulag. Many changed their Latvian surnames, for even to be Latvian was suspect. Stalin considered all Latvians in Russia to be spies for independent Latvia. The persecution of Latvians, especially Latvian communists, was almost genocidal in nature. Most tragic of all was the fate of the gifted writer and poet Linards Laicens. In independent Latvia, he had enthused about the proletarian revolution. More than once spending time in prison, he always returned to editing leftist journals. In 1928, while in prison, he was elected to the Saeima (parliament) as a representative of the communist Workers' and Farmers' List. He was a Saeima deputy until 1932, when he went to "the fatherland of all workers," the Soviet Union. There he received many honors. In 1934 Laicens participated in the First All-Union Writers' Congress, representing the "Western proletarian writers' group." But in the end he too was arrested and was shot like a dog on December 14,1938. So ended the dream of the "world commune."
The dream ended also for thousands of Jewish communists who were shot in Stalin's Great Purge, which lasted from 1934 to 1939. Stalin then did not yet dare to openly declare his anti-Semitism. It was enough to call Jews he wanted to liquidate "Trotskyite" or "Zinovievist"; that was sufficient to kill outright or starve to death in labor camps untold numbers of Jewish commissars and diplomats, Chekists and officers, editors and writers, including those as talented as Isaac Babel, Vsevolod Meyerhold, and Osip Mandelstam.
The anti-Semitic tone of the purge was quite noticeable, and Nazi propaganda to the contrary was completely unfounded. A Nazi line in the summer of 1941 was that the Soviet Union was run by "the Kaganovitches and the Kosherovitches." Lazar Kaganovitch and Zakhar Mekhlis, Stalin's personal friends and favorites, were rare exceptions. After 1939, when the Jew Litvinov was replaced as foreign minister by Molotov, there were no Jews left in the top echelons of the Kremlin.
I would like to mention one more interesting episode. In the first volume of his memoirs, published in Stockholm in 1983, the leader of the Latvian Social Democrats Bruno Kalnins mentions a certain young man, Herberts Cukurs. Cukurs was expelled from the Social Democrat youth group in Liepaja in February 1919 for advocating Bolshevik propaganda. He was in contact with Karlis Petersons, war commissar of the Latvian Bolshevik leadership. In the years of Latvia's independence, Cukurs was a famous pilot. He became a rabid anti-Semite, and in the fall of 1941 personally participated in the shooting of Riga ghetto Jews in the Rumbula forest. He was assassinated on February 24,1965, in Uruguay's capital Montevideo by self-styled "revengers" from an organization called "Those who do not forget" Indeed, an odd destiny, a strange fate.