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[yialousa1971]

Vladimir Lenin Was Part Jewish, Say Declassified KGB Files

By EMMANUEL GRYNSZPAN / LE TEMPS / WORLDCRUNCH – Tue Jun 14, 6:20 pm ET




This post is in partnership with Worldcrunch, a new global-news site that translates stories of note in foreign languages into English. The article below was originally published in Le Temps.

(MOSCOW) - A recently opened exhibition in Moscow's State Historical Museum is shedding some light on a long-guarded Russian secret: the origins of Soviet founding father Vladimir Lenin. Lenin's maternal grandfather, the exhibition revealed, was born Jewish.

This fascinating morsel of information, gleaned from declassified KGB files, is not a minor detail in a country where anti-Semitism was a recognized state doctrine for decades. Starting in the 1930s, the Soviet regime - spurred on by its leader Joseph Stalin - launched a violent discriminatory campaign against Jewish citizens. (See the top 25 political icons: Lenin)

Born in 1870, Lenin identified himself simply as Russian. His official biography mentions only his Russian, German and Swedish origins. But one of the exhibition's priceless pieces adds a key new element to the official narrative.

In a letter to Stalin in 1932 - six years after Lenin's death - Anna Ulyanova, Lenin's older sister, wrote that their maternal grandfather "came from a poor Jewish family and was, according to his baptismal certificate, the son of Moses Blank." Blank was born in Zhitomir, Ukraine. In her letter, Ulyanova said her brother "had always thought highly of Jews." She also urged Stalin to reveal Lenin's Jewish background, concluding that "it would be wrong to hide it from the masses."

Stalin, however, ordered Ulyanova to keep Lenin's Jewish roots under wraps. A few years later, Stalin began to purge Jews from among the leaders of the revolution. Prior to his death in 1953, furthermore, he was preparing to send the whole Jewish population living in the Soviet Union to concentration camps in Siberia.

Most provincial Russian towns have a main road named Lenin Street. You can usually find shops selling luxury goods and banking centers there. They tend to contain all the flashiest symbols of the country's now capitalist society. (See TIME's photo-essay "The Bolshevik October Revolution.")

In the middle of virtually every central square, including in Belarus and in Ukraine, there is a high-rise statue of Lenin looking down on the rowdy shopkeepers. The Lenin paradox even goes further. Lenin is revered by Russia's radical fringe - people who feel nostalgic for the Soviet regime in general and for anti-Semitic Stalinism in particular.

The cult of Lenin has its physical focal point in Moscow's Red Square, where Lenin's mummified body is on permanent display in a mausoleum. In the past, Soviet citizens were expected to carry out pilgrimages to the Communist leader's resting place. (See photos of Aleksander Solzhenitsyn 1918 [EM] 2008)

Lenin's legacy is the subject of debate. Some Russian Communists want Lenin's cult to endure forever. But there are Russian Orthodox Christians who loathe Lenin because he destroyed Tsarism and because he turned atheism into a cornerstone of the official ideology. The latter, like many ordinary Russian people, want the man to be buried - with or without the honors reserved for a statesman.

Russians who began their working lives after the fall of the communist system often see things in the same ambivalent way. "Soviet children almost regarded Grandfather Lenin as Santa Claus," says Daria Beliaeva, a 30-year-old financial analyst who looks back at the Soviet era with nostalgia. "But later, I heard that the Germans sent him to Russia in an armored train to trigger the Russian revolution. I also heard that he ordered the destruction of about 100 churches," the practicing Orthodox adds disapprovingly.

Daria wasn't particularly moved one way or the other when she heard the Soviet idol had Jewish roots. "He had elements of good and evil in him. He put his mark on Russian history. Now, he needs to be buried."

Political expert Boris Kagarlitski, a former dissident and proud Leninist, says "the Russian authorities are using the debate about Lenin's Jewish background and about his burial as a pretext for taking people's minds off the real problems and issues facing our society."

Even if latent anti-Semitism does not play an active role in contemporary Russian politics, the Lenin exhibition could end up cutting into the famed revolutionary's enduring popularity. It might also persuade authorities to once and for all put his embalmed body to rest.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20110614/w ... 9207741300

[yialousa1971]

Lenin's Jewish Roots Displayed In Moscow Museum

MOSCOW -- For the first time ever, ordinary Russians can now see documents that appear to confirm long-standing rumors that Vladimir Lenin had Jewish heritage.

In a country long plagued by anti-Semitism, such heritage can be a significant taint, especially for the founder of the Soviet Union who is still revered by many elderly Russians.

Among dozens of newly released documents on display at the State History Museum is a letter written by Lenin's eldest sister, Anna Ulyanova, saying that their maternal grandfather was a Ukrainian Jew who converted to Christianity to escape the Pale of Settlement and gain access to higher education.

"He came from a poor Jewish family and was, according to his baptismal certificate, the son of Moses Blank, a native of (the western Ukrainian city of) Zhitomir," Ulyanova wrote in a 1932 letter to Josef Stalin, who succeeded Lenin after his death in 1924.

"Vladimir Ilych had always thought of Jews highly," she wrote. "I am very sorry that the fact of our origin – which I had suspected before – was not known during his lifetime."

Under czarist rule, most Jews were allowed permanent residence only in a restricted area that became known as the Pale of Settlement which included much of present-day Lithuania, Belarus, Poland, Moldova, Ukraine and parts of western Russia.

Many Jews joined the Bolsheviks to fight rampant anti-Semitism in czarist Russia and some were among the leaders of the Communist Party when it took power after the 1917 Revolution. Most prominent among them was Leon Trotsky, whose real name was Bronstein.

But Lenin, who was born Vladimir Ilych Ulyanov in 1870, identified himself only as Russian. He took Lenin as his nom de guerre in 1901 while in Siberian exile near the Lena River.

A brief period of promotion of Jewish culture that began under Lenin ended in the early 1930s when Stalin orchestrated anti-Semitic purges among Communists and hatched a plan to relocate all Soviet Jews to a region on the Chinese border.

Ulyanova asked Stalin to make Lenin's Jewish heritage known to counter the rise of anti-Semitism. "I hear that in recent years anti-Semitism has been growing stronger again, even among Communists," she wrote. "It would be wrong to hide the fact from the masses."

Stalin ignored the plea and ordered her to "keep absolute silence" about her letter, according to the exhibition's curator, Tatyana Koloskova.

Lenin's official biography, written by his niece Olga Ulyanova, said his family had only Russian, German and Swedish roots.

The letter from Lenin's sister became available to Russian historians in the early 1990s, but its authenticity was fiercely disputed. It was chosen for inclusion in the exhibit by Koloskova, who as director of the State History Museum's branch dedicated to Lenin is one of the most authoritative scholars on his life.

The exhibition in the museum on Red Square, near the mausoleum where Lenin's body still lies, also discloses that he was in such misery after suffering a stroke in 1922 that he asked Stalin to bring him poison.

"He did not incidentally pick Stalin to fulfill this request," Lenin's youngest sister, Maria Ulyanova, wrote in a 1922 diary entry. "He knew Comrade Stalin as a steadfast Bolshevik, straight and devoid of any sentimentality. Who else would dare to end Lenin's life?"

Initially, Stalin promised to help Lenin, but other Politburo members decided to turn down his request, the letter says. Trotsky, whom Stalin forced out of the Soviet Union, claimed in his memoirs that Stalin had poisoned Lenin.

The 111 documents on display, many of them only recently declassified and all of them open to the public for the first time, give surprising insights into top figures of the Soviet Union. Men usually portrayed as stern and fearless are seen as sometimes whimsical, frightened and even despairing.

One of the documents contains a desperate plea that Stalin received in 1934 from an arrested Communist leader, Lev Kamenev, whose real name was Rosenfeld.

"At a time when my soul is filled with nothing but love for the party and its leadership, when, having lived through hesitations and doubts, I can boldly say that I learned to highly trust the Central Committee's every step and every decision you, Comrade Stalin, make," Kamenev wrote. "I have been arrested for my ties to people that are strange and disgusting to me."

Stalin ignored this letter, too, and Kamenev was executed in 1936.

A slightly more humorous – but no less macabre – aspect of the exhibition is caricatures drawn by Politburo members.

Nikolai Bukharin, a leading Communist ideologue, depicts Stalin with a giant, exaggerated nose and his trademark pipe. His portrayal of other Communists is also unflattering – one is shown as a White Army officer. The anti-Communist White Army, which was backed by Western powers, unsuccessfully fought Lenin's Red Army in a civil war from 1917-23.

Prominent economist Valery Mezhlauk ridicules Trotsky as a Wandering Jew and depicts a finance minister hanging in an awkward position. In a handwritten note under the latter caricature, Stalin recommends that the minister be hanged by his testicles.

The minister and both cartoonists were arrested and executed in 1938.

The exhibition, which opened last week, runs through July 3.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/2 ... 66098.html

http://www.themoscowtimes.com/news/arti ... 37886.html

[supporttheunderdog]

Karl Marx was also partly Jewish -

Question - is Chris Toffee our (sweet but thick) Marxist-Leninist President part of an(other) alleged Jewish plot to take over the world??