November 7: The Bolsheviks Take Over

The Russian provisional government headed by Alexander Kerensky was overthrown by the Bolsheviks on this date in 1917. Among the Jews playing key roles in the infant communist regime were Leon Trotsky (Bronstein), who headed the Red Army, Yakov Sverdlov (Solomon), executive secretary of the Bolsheviks and head of their Central Executive Committee, and Grigori Zinoviev, head of the Communist International (Comintern). Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev (Rosenfeld), the chair of the Moscow Soviet, were the only two members of the Central Executive to oppose the seizure of power, though both of them went along with it. Other key Jewish participants were press commissar Karl Radek (Sobelsohn), who helped smuggle Lenin into Russia from Germany prior to the revolution; foreign affairs secretary Maxim Litvinov (Wallach); and Moisei Uritsky, who headed the Petrograd Cheka. Most of them would be devoured by Joseph Stalin: Zinoviev and Kamenev would be among the first Old Bolsheviks executed by him as Trotskyists and traitors, in 1936; Radek was deliberately killed in a labor camp in 1939; Trotsky was hunted down and assassinated in Mexico in 1940. Sverdlov and Radek were killed in the turmoil of the early revolution. The heavy presence of Jews in the communist movement, including among its executioners, became grist for the Nazi propaganda mill in the 1930s and a “justification” for post-war anti-Semitism throughout eastern Europe — and in the U.S. For a contemporary taste of it, watch the video below.
“[Bolshevism] among the Jews is nothing new. From the days of Spartacus-Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxembourg (Germany), and Emma Goldman (United States), this world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing.” —Winston Churchill