Trotsky and Shoah

Kesher Talk's recent noting of Trotsky sparked in me a reflection on how much Jewish involvement in the Red revolution in Russia sparked a German response against the Jews as 'the river in which the revolutionaries swim' to adapt Ho Chi Minh. Solzhenitsyn has a recent book 'Alone Together' or 'Two Hundred Years Together'* which ideally would cast light on the reality in Russia. Though it has been used as a polemic for answering my question positively, the reality, cf. the generous review of noted scholar Richard Pipes and another very interesting Russian source review, seems to leave the ascetic author correctly viewed as autistic. One could view the evidence as suggesting that the hypothesis of my opening sentence is an intellectual bridge too far.

The psychological fact would seem to be that Trotsky's action challenged those who believed in Jewish dhimmitude and the role of the Jew in this challenge became the primary problem with communist Russia, its other defects flowing from that, rather than the Red revolution being an unfortunate totalitarianism destroying the world of Chekov and Tolstoy and common men in which some Jews, ? apostate, but mostly others, nonorigined participated. Nevertheless, it would have been better for the Jews and everybody else, given Lev Davidovitch Bronsteins's being successful as head of the Red Army, if he had followed that admonition which almost undoubtedly occurred to him, "Es ist nicht bar dir." As Anna Freud told me in a letter of August 9, 1971 "...it is very necessary to come to terms with oneself before one is really able to do something drastic about the environment, whether the drastic action is positive or negative."

*compendium of reviews here.