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Spring Plowing
In Sovietland
~A Hirds-Lye View
of Jewish Jdife in ^Russia
By Pierre Van Paassen
Russia. Thi s 1°"'a" {0rr . ts f ,ondrnt ' > ust concluded his first visit to Soviet
investigations. Pierre I an Paassen / * Jewish conditions and his first statement after a thorough
an / aassen will he remembered throughout the South, because of hi, successful lec
tures in (. hattanooga and .•Itlanta.
I N the midst of the terrific social upheaval,
produced by the collapse of Czarism and
the inability of the Russian middle classes
r Kerensky and Muliukoff to establish or-
,i< ot some sort out of that unimaginable chaos,
no thought was apparently given to the des
perate condition of the Jewish populations in
the territories devastated by the contending
mies of Russia and Germany and subsequently
In the various free-booting and looting bandits
in arms of the type of Simon Petlura, beyond
a tew saccharine but practically meaningless
declarations on the part of the Provisional Gov
ernment.
W ith foreign interventionist armies occupy
ing eighteen different strategic points on Rus
sian territory, the commander of one of which
boasted later of having blown up no less than
2.000 railway bridges and having destroyed
10,000 farm houses, the incoming Soviets had
even graver problems on their hands than sing
ling out the Jewish question for an immediate
solution. On top of that came a fierce drought
and inevitable famine coupled with an epidemic
typhus and dysentery, all of monstrous pro
portions. 1 he blockade instituted by “Chris-
tians Civilization as a cordon sanitaire against
the economic and social theories of Bolshevism,
kept out the required medical supplies and nine
teen million human beings perished.
( hie of the results of this unparalleled series
ot disasters was, when the civil wars were over
and those “white” pogroms of truly holocaustic
dimensions had finally run their course, that
tlie Soviets inherited in 1921 no less than 227,-
Jewish orphans under the age of ten years in
<■ l kraine and White Russia alone; 35,000 Jew-
1 ) beggars and 113,000 Jews who had formerly
perated taprooms. The abolition of private prop-
' bad further declassed about a million and a
tarter Jews, while another million Jewish arti-
s m\ who had never been wage-earners, continued
" eke out such a miserable existence that we are
l l,lte s afe in classing them with the "Lumpen-
loletariat,” that is to say with the poorest sub-
i atum of the population. Fully two million
f ‘ ws *n Russia were in 1921 reduced to circum-
mces scarcely to be dignified with the name of
human.
A bat have the Soviets done with them in the
of economic and social rehabilitation? 1 his
the question which we will seek to answer
by and objectively here. We are not concerned
be moment with vague and metaphysical dis-
ions such as that question whether or not the
!et s are out to “kill the Jewish soul.” It is
“ingible Jewish body, which reacts to the same
'icai laws as that of others, which seem of
arc importance, if not to us in America then
in ly to the Jews of Russia. I he question
Are the Jews in Russia starving as I saw
starve but recently in Poland and Rumania?
ir ‘le Jewish children going about with swol-
'domens and big heads in Minsk and Moscow
I’otirlMjr IniMirnt. Iih-
.7 Glimpse of the Great Petrovsky Iron and Steel ll’orks
and Charkoff and Kalimendorff as i saw them
in pitiable state of malnutrition in Kalish and
Lemberg and Kishineff and Braila? And finally
this question, too, we may well pose: Are the Jews
of Soviet Russia living under the shadow of anti-
Semitic terror, as the Jews of (iermany
are at present? Is there a pogrom
atmosphere in Poltawa, l krainia as
there exists in Cracow, Poland and in
Bucharest, Rumania? Is there anyone
taking the place in Russia of Cuza or
Hitler or of government-abetted organ
izations like fiendish Christian Demo
cratic Leagues, torturing Awakening
Magyars or bomb-throwing Nazis?
Are there, or are there not?
The all-overshadowing problem con
fronting the declassed Jews in the
Soviet Union was and remains to this
day the question of bread, the continua
tion of physical existence. Private
trading which had in the past placed
the mass of the Jews, and especially
those engaged in the Schnapps business
with the side occupation of money
lending, in a dangerous social opposi
tion to their neighbors was abolished.
Herewith one of the chief sources of
peasant anti-Semitism was eliminated.
Not that the peasants suddenly became lovable
and altruistic angels. Such would have hern
a miracle more wondrous than the metamorpho
sis of Loth’s wife into a pillar of salt. But
the old social reason for detesting the Jews
had disappeared. I hr detestation itself still
lingers especially among the old generation,
just as belief in where wolves and ghostly ap
paritions persist to this day among the peasants
of Flanders, who live within hailing distance
of Paris and London.
At that I venture to say that there is less
anti Semitic feeling in the Soviet Union today
than there is in America
Anti-Semitism remains one of the chief
weapons of the dethroned reaction both inside
and outside the Soviet Union. In the Russian
emigre circles hatred of the Jews is character
ized by a rancor more bitter and venomenous
than even the Uzarists or Hitlerites have hith
erto exhibited in their wildest moments of anti-
Jewish exaltation. It is a significant but un
deniable fact that anti-Sovietism and anti-Semit
ism frequently go hand in hand.
Basing myself on a thorough going acquaint
ance with the Russian emigre circles in Paris.
Constantinople and Yugo-Slavia, where I al
ways found the crudest, the most relentless and
the vilest sort of anti-Semitism rampant, I
would say this: If that Czarist crowd and its
numerous retinue ever managed to stagr a come
back—as they constantly predict—woe to Rus
sian Israel! Such an eventuality, which is,
however, becoming less and less likely with the
passage of years, would unquestionably, given
the mood of the emigres, surpass in horror the
combined St. Bartholetnews, Kieffs and Sicilian
Vespers of history!
By the creation of new economic conditions
which virtually eliminate Unease turn to page 22)
SOUTHERN ISRAELITE W
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