Putin’s ‘De-Nazification’ Claim Began With Marx and Stalin
Anti-Semitic myths have long been a staple of communist ideology and Soviet disinformation.
Supporters of Joseph Stalin mark the anniversary of his birth in a ceremony at the Red Square in Moscow, Dec. 21, 2021.
PHOTO: DIMITAR DILKOFF/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
Vladimir Putin’s pretext for war against Ukraine—to “de-Nazify” a democratic country led by a Jewish president—would be preposterous were it not resting on a myth long a staple of Soviet disinformation and ideological warfare.
The rationale harkens back to the centuries-old caricature of the greedy Jew, Shakespeare’s Shylock, recycled by Karl Marx in his 1844 essay “On the Jewish Question.” Claiming that “the God of the Jew is money,” Marx, himself a Jew, blamed capitalist exploitation on greed, specifically the Hebrew variety.
Decades later, as fascism joined Nazism, Marxists consigned both to the last stage of capitalism and history. Come the revolution, the Marxists reasoned, when communism abolishes property and thus greed disappears, so will Judaism. That explains in part why many communist Jews in Russia abandoned their religion and traditions.
But that apostasy wasn’t enough for Joseph Stalin, who never trusted his Jewish comrades, notably his principal rival, Leon Trotsky (born Lev Davidovitch Bronstein ). In the 1930s, Stalin found the perfect rationale for killing his opponents and escalating internal repression: The “traitors” were in league with “world imperialism.”
This neo-Marxist narrative persisted and Mr. Putin, a KGB colonel turned billionaire, is using an updated version against Ukraine. Here’s a brief history.
Beyond its domestic virtues, antifascism well served Soviet foreign policy by implying that the U.S.S.R. belonged to the democratic bloc. Stalin’s 1939 pact with Hitler notwithstanding, once Germany invaded Russia in 1941, Soviet antifascism re-emerged in full after the Soviet Union joined the Allies.
Lulled by their illusions about Stalin’s regime, many Western leaders looked the other way as Soviet forces began rolling over Eastern Europe, playing down the Holocaust as they went. Throughout the territory “liberated” by the Soviets in Eastern and Central Europe, Jewish victims were all but ignored as Stalin sought to keep the focus on Russian losses. In 1949 Soviet support for admitting Israel to the United Nations was similarly self-interested and ephemeral. Once it became clear that Israel wouldn’t become a Soviet client state, Moscow’s backing evaporated.
Increasingly paranoid, Stalin began weaving accusations of “Jewish nationalism” and “cosmopolitanism”—a euphemism for the unpatriotic Jew—into a Zionist conspiracy. He linked Israeli and Western imperialism to what became known as “The Doctors’ Plot,” an alleged plan to assassinate Stalin and other Soviet leaders. Only his death in 1953 saved the accused doctors, most of them Jews, from execution.
Stalin had already decided to recycle the infamous conspiracy theory published in 1903, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” Purporting to be minutes of a meeting among rich Jews planning to take over the world, the “Protocols” had long been exposed as a forgery clumsily concocted by the czarist secret police, the Okhrana. Nonetheless, the world-wide dissemination of the “Protocols” after 1951 has been powerfully effective. It provided anti-Zionists with ammunition for attacking Jews and fed fears of a world-wide Jewish conspiracy.
Still, as the historian Robert S. Wistrich wrote, “it was only after 1967 that antisemitism and anti-Zionism would assume a truly systematic and organized character. . . . In place of the relentless Nazi myth about ‘Jewish Bolshevism,’ the Soviet Communists began to fabricate the equally mendacious thesis of ‘Jewish Nazism.’ ”
The idea of a Zionist-imperialist-fascist-American conspiracy culminated in the infamous “Zionism is racism” resolution, passed in 1975 by a majority of United Nations member states. By the time the resolution was repealed in 1991, it had done significant damage. Osama bin Laden believed the fantasies of the “Protocols,” Mr. Wistrich wrote in his book “A Lethal Obsession.” The jihadist’s conviction that the world is run by a capitalist, Jewish cabal explains why the 9/11 suicide hijackers expected the World Trade Center to be full of Jews.
Placed in its historical context, this myth of antifascism, anti-Nazism and anti-Zionism is far more than rhetoric. In Mr. Putin’s hands, we see its brutality, to which the world appears to be awakening.
Ms. Pilon is a senior fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization and author of “The Utopian Conceit and the War on Freedom.”
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