Talk:Lance Richbourg

Żydokomuna (Polish for "Judeo-Communism" or "Judeo-Bolshevism") is a pejorative term that has been used to express an antisemitic stereotype that blamed Jews for having advocated, introduced and run communism in Poland. Żydokomuna is a variant on the idea of 'Judeo-communism'—a combination of antisemitism, anti-communism, and anti-Sovietism—which had a strong influence throughout Eastern Europe, including countries such as Poland with large interwar Jewish minorities.

Origins

The word Żydokomuna dates to a pamphlet written in 1817 (but not published until 1858) by the Polish Enlightenment writer and political activist Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz, The Year 3333, or the Incredible Dream (Rok 3333 czyli Sen niesłychany). The novel reflected the widespread fears of Jewish economic influence and a desire to slow down or halt the process of Jewish assimilation, and presented a doomsday vision in which Poland would become a sinister "Judeo-Polonia" run by assimilated Jews. It described a Warsaw of the future, renamed Moshkopolis (in the Polish, Moszkopolis) after its Jewish ruler Moshko (in the Polish, Moszko), and was published during the period of European Jewish history known as the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah).

The term Żydokomuna was rediscovered and popularized during and after the Bolshevik revolution. "Many Poles felt directly threatened both by the prospect of revolution and by Russian imperialism in a new guise, which they saw embodied in the Soviet regime." The visibility of Jews in both the Soviet leadership and in the Polish Communist Party further heightened such fears. According to Jaff Schatz, the strength of the Żydokomuna myth stemmed from the combination of age-old Polish fear of Russia as well as both, the anti-communist and antisemitic attitudes. Schatz writes that "because anti-Semitism was one of the main forces that drew Jews to the Communist movement, Żydokomuna meant turning the effects of anti-Semitism into a cause of its further increase." The myth gave a powerful boost to modern antisemitism by amplifying the myth of a "Jewish world conspiracy" with a volatile mix of antisemitism and anti-communism.

The expression was used once more during the Polish-Soviet War of 1919-21, when massacres and violence against Jews, such as the Pinsk massacre, were justified by Jewish support of the Soviets along the eastern borderlands. leading to the widely spread myth that all Polish Jews were Bolsheviks and/or communists. The Żydokomuna myth became a popular propaganda tool among the Polish Right during the the years leading up to World War II. The Jewish role in the communist movement in Poland or internationally was not a factor in shaping the relationship between Jewish and non-Jewish Poles at this time. Although Jews were well represented in the Polish Communist Party, Jewish communists were a minuscule political and social group with little or no actual influence in the Polish Jewish community or Poland as a whole. Nevertheless, Polish Catholic church publications commonly expressed the anti-Jewish incitement.

During World War II the term Żydokomuna was made to resemble the Jewish-Bolshevism rhetoric of Nazi Germany, wartime Romania and other war-torn countries of Central and Eastern Europe. A number of historians, such as Jan T. Gross maintain that there was a strong tradition of anti-Semitism which provided a base for Żydokomuna to feed upon.

History

Second Polish Republic (1918 - 1939)

In the period between the two world wars, the żydokomuna myth grew concurrently in Poland with the myth of the "criminal Jew." Statistics from the 1920s had indicated a Jewish crime rate that was well below the Jewish population percentage. However, a subsequent reclassification of how crime was reported—which now would include minor offenses—succeeded in reversing the trend, and Jewish criminal statistics had shows an increase relative to population by the 1930s. These statistics were used by the Polish antisemitic press to propagate an image of the "criminal Jew;" additionally, political crimes by Jews were magnified, creating a perception of a criminal Żydokomuna.

Jews and the Polish Communist Party beteeen the wars

Support for Poland's communist and pro-Soviet parties came largely from Ukrainian and Orthodox Belarusian voters. As noted by historian Joseph Marcus, the Polish Communist Party (KPP) was not a "Jewish party," and was in opposition to Jewish economic and national interests Nonetheless, the KPP had strong Jewish representation at higher levels. Those Jews rejected much of the Jewish culture and tradition, and saw themselves as international communists. In Polish court proceedings against communists between 1927 and 1936, 90% of the accused were Jews. Out of fifteen leaders of the KPP central administration in 1936, eight were Jews. Jews constituted 53% of the "active members" (aktyw) of the KPP, 75% of its "publication apparatus", 90% of the "international department for help to revolutionaries" and 100% of the "technical apparatus" of the Home Secretariat. In terms of membership, before its dissolution in 1938, 25% of KPP members were Jews; most urban KPP members were Jews—a substantial number, given an 8.7% Jewish minority in prewar Poland.

Research on voting patterns in Poland's parliamentary elections in the 1920s has shown that Jewish support for the communists was proportionally less than their representation in the total population. Jaff Schatz notes that even if post-war claims by Jewish communists that 40% of the 266 528 communist votes on several lists of front organizations at the 1928 Sejm election came from the Jewish community were true (a claim Marcus describes as "almost certainly an exaggeration"), this total would amount to total of no more than 5% of Jewish votes for the communists, indicating the Jewish population at large was "far from sympathetic to communism." In the end, while most Jews were neither communists nor communist sympathizers, a substantial and quite visible portion of the Polish Communist leadership in the interwar period were Jews. However, research by Jeffrey Koppstein and Jason Wittenberg, who analyzed the communist vote in interwar Poland, has shown that the notion of the "communist Jew" was a myth at the mass level. The authors note that not only were most communists not Jews, but most Jews were not communists, and in fact "Jews were no more communist than the Catholic Poles, and far less so than the Belarusans or Ukrainians." Nonetheless it was the disproportionately large representation of Jews in the communist leadership led to the spread of the Żydokomuna myth, which in the late 1930s was widely used in the propaganda of the National Democrats, who after Józef Piłsudski's death in 1935 hoped to take power.

Soviet invasion of Poland

Following the 1939 Soviet invasion of Poland, Jewish communities in eastern Poland welcomed with relief the Soviet occupation, which they saw as a "lesser of two evils" from openly antisemitic Nazi Germany. Additionally, the Soviets had an official policy of opposition to antisemitism, which was welcomed by Polish Jews alienated by the increasingly antisemitic Polish state. Soviet invaders "had plenty of Polish money and paid any price demanded by the Jewish shopkeepers... projecting a most positive image of the new Soviet man." However, this response implanted in the Polish collective memory the image of Jewish crowds greeting the invading Red Army as liberators, further strengthening the antisemitic żydokomuna myth. Such behavior affronted non-Jewish Poles, who likely exaggerated Jewish participation in the Soviet occupation because a Jewish presence in the government apparatus was a novel phenomenon in 1939 Poland. Jews and other minorities from within Poland occupied positions in the Soviet occupation government—such as teachers, civil servants and engineers—that they trouble achieving under the Polish government. What Poles saw as occupation and betrayal, some Jews, including Polish Jewish communists who emerged from the underground, saw as an opportunity for revolution or retribution. This strengthened the myth of żydokomuna, which would hold Jews responsible for the introduction of communism in Poland. Jews waving red flags to welcome Soviet troops rose to great symbolic meaning in Polish memory of the period.

Though Jews had benefited from the effects of the Soviet invasion, this occupation soon began to strike at the Jewish population as well; independent Jewish organizations were abolished and activists were arrested. Hundreds of thousands of Jews who had fled to the Soviet sector were given a choice of Soviet citizenship or returning to the German occupied zone. The majority chose the latter, and instead found themselves deported to the Soviet Union, where ironically, 300,000 would escape the Holocaust. Jewish armed groups had difficulty joining the official Polish resistance group, the Armia Krajowa; some Jewish groups were forced to rob local Polish peasants for food, in turn Polish underground often labeled those armed Jewish groups fighting for survival in the forests as "bandits" and "robbers." Jewish partisans instead more often joined the Armia Ludowa of the communist Polish Workers' Party and Soviet guerrilla groups, which increasingly clashed with Polish guerillas; contributing to yet another perception of Jews working with the Soviets against the Poles.

While there was Polish Jewish representation in the London-based government in exile, the underground Delegate's Bureau and the Armia Krajowa exhibited an ethno-nationalism that excluded Jews. The attitudes of the Delegate's Bureau and the AK was one which saw Jews and ethnic Poles as separate entities, and communications from the underground to the government-in-exile showed a favorable attitude towards an ethnically homogeneous Poland free of Jews. Historian Israel Gutman has noted that AK leader Stefan Rowecki had advocated that long-range considerations of the underground would be abandoned and that an all out uprising would be launched should the Germans undertake a campaign of extermination against ethnic Poles, but that no such plan existed while the extermination of Polish Jewish citizens was under way.

Post World War II

Immediately after World War II, the Soviet-backed communist government lent support to the revival of Jewish cultural, political, and social life, which had been decimated by the Holocaust. Thousands of Jews returned from exile in Soviet Union; amongst them were a small number of Jewish communists who played a minor, but highly visible role in the unpopular communist government and its security apparatus. The new government's hostility to the wartime Polish exile government and resistance — which it accused of being nationalist, reactionary and antisemitic — further strengthened the myth, to the point where in the popular consciousness Jewish Bolshevism was seen as having conquered Poland. It was in this context reinforced by the immediate post-war lawlessness that Poland experienced an unprecedented wave of anti-Jewish violence.

Regarding this period, Andre Gerrits writes, in his study of the myth, that although communism was now a reality in Poland

the vigour of antisemitism during the first post-war decade cannot be exclusively attributed to the prominent role of individuals of Jewish extraction in the newly-established Communist regimes. Various factors played a role—from the continuation of traditional anti-Jewish sentiments (ethnically or religiously inspired) to the overall radicalizing effect of the war and the fear that the Jews who returned from camps, exile or hiding would reclaim their belongings.

1950s

During Stalinism, the preferred Soviet policy was to keep sensitive posts in the hands of non-Poles. As a result "all or nearly all of the directors (of the Ministry of Public Security of Poland) were Jewish" as noted by award-winning historian Teresa Torańska among others. A recent study by the Polish Institute of National Remembrance showed that out of 450 people in director positions in the Ministry (from 1944 to 1954), 167 (37.1%) were of Jewish ethnicity, compared to an approximately 1% of the Polish post-war Jewish population.

These Jewish members of the security forces would become useful as scapegoats in the period of de-Stalinization. According to one account

While Poland’s communists had been highly selective in their choice of Jewish scapegoats after Stalin’s death, if only because other Jews in the party and security apparatus could not be excluded from participating in the whole process, and the desire of the leadership to keep a tight grip on the scope of the ensuing investigations, there is further evidence to suggest that Poland’s communists had grown accustomed to placing the burden of their own failures to gain sufficient legitimacy among the Polish population during the entire communist period on the shoulders of Jews in the party.

Among the notable Jewish officials of the Polish secret police and security services were Julia Brystiger, Anatol Fejgin, Józef Światło, Roman Romkowski, and Józef Różański; Światło defected to the West in 1953, while Romkowski and Różański would find themselves among the Jewish scapegoats for Polish Stalinism in the political upheavals following Stalin's death. While Jews were indeed overrepresented in various Polish communist organizations, including the oppressive security apparatus, relative to their percentage of the general population, the vast majority of Jews did not participate in the repressive apparatus, and indeed most were not supportive of communism. The categorization of the security forces as a Jewish institution, as disseminated in the post-war anti-communist press at various times, is biased and rooted in a belief in Żydokomuna. Szwagrzyk has also quoted Jan T. Gross, who argued that many Jews who worked for the communist party cut their ties with their – Jewish, Polish or Russian – culture, and tried to represent the interests of international communism only, or at least that of the local communist government. Nonetheless, the inaccurate belief that the secret police was a predominantly Jewish institution was one of the factors keeping the Żydokomuna myth alive and contributed to the post-war stereotype of Jews as agents of the secret police.

The Żydokomuna myth and scapegoating of Jews reappeared at times of severe political and socio-economic crises in Stalinist Poland. After the death of Polish United Workers' Party leader Bolesław Bierut in 1956, a de-Stalinization and a subsequent battle among rival factions looking to lay blame for the excesses of the Stalin era. As described in one historical account, the party hardline "Natolin" faction "once again used anti-Semitism as a political weapon and found an echo both in the party apparat and in society at large, where traditional stereotypes of an insidious Jewish cobweb of political influence and economic gain resurfaced, but now in the context of 'Judeo-communism,' the Żydokomuna." "Natolin" leader Zenon Nowak entered the concept of "Judeo-Stalinization" and placed the blame for the party's failures, errors and repression on "the Jewish apparatchiks." Documents from this period chronicle antisemitic attitudes within Polish society, including beatings of Jews, loss of employment, and persecution. These outbursts of antisemitic sentiment from both Polish society and within the rank and file of the ruling party spurred the exodus of some 40,000 Polish Jews between 1956 and 1958.

1960s-present

The numbers of Jews in communist structures gradually fell. Urząd Bezpieczeństwa was liquidated. With time, more Poles joined the communist party. Interior minister Mieczysław Moczar's nationalist "anti-Zionist" faction became increasingly influential in the communist party, leading to the March 1968 events, and a government sponsored antisemitic campaign which resulted in most remaining Jews leaving Poland. Moczar's "Partisan" faction promulgated an ideology that has been described as an "eerie reincarnation" of the views of the pre-world War 2 National Democratic Party (Poland), and even at times exploiting the anti-semitic Żydokomuna myth. After Israel's victory in the 1967 Arab Israeli war, the Polish government, following the Soviet lead, launched an antisemitic campaign under the guise of "anti-Zionism", with both Moczar's faction, as well that of Party Secetetary Wladyslaw Gomulka playing leading roles. The campaign however did not find resonance with the general public, as most Poles saw Israel's fight for survival as similar to Poland's past struggles for independence and many Poles felt pride in the success of the Israeli military which was dominated by Polish Jews - the popular view, unlike that of the government, was that "Our Jews" beat "Soviet Arabs". The campaign was put to domestic use, when in March 1968 a wave of unrest among students and intellectuals, unrelated to the Six-Day War, swept Poland. The anti-semitic campaign served multiple purposes, most notably the suppression of the protests, which were branded as inspired by a "fifth column" of Zionists, as well as a tactic in a political struggle between Gomulka and Moczar, both of whom played the Jewish card in a nationalist appeal. As historian Dariusz Stola notes, the anti-Jewish campaign combined century old conspiracy theories, recycled antisemitic claims and classic communist propaganda. Regarding the tailoring of the Zydokomuna myth to communist Poland, Stola writes:

Paradoxically, probably the most powerful slogan of the communist propaganda in March was the accusation that the Jews were zealous communists. They were blamed for a major part, if not all, of the crimes and horrors of the Stalinist period. The myth of Judeo-bolshevism had been well known in Poland since the Russian revolution and the Polish-Bolshevik war of 1920, yet its 1968 model deserves interest as a tool of communist propaganda. This accusation exploited and developed the popular stereotype of Jewish communism to purify communism: the Jews were the dark side of communism; what was wrong in communism was due to them.

Ultimately the communist elites utilized the "Jews as Zionist" myth for a purge of Jews from scientific and cultural institutions, publishing houses, and national TV and radio stations.

Stola also notes that one of the effects of the antisemitic campaign of 1968 was to thoroughly discredit the Communist government in the eyes of the public. As a result, when the concept of the Jew as a "threatening other" was employed in the 1970s and 1980's in Poland by the communist government in its attacks on the political opposition, including against the Solidarity trade union movement and against the Workers' Defence Committee (Komitet Obrony Robotników, or KOR) it was completely unsuccessful.. This image of the Jew was also used by the anti-communist opposition, including by segments of the Solidarity movement. Post communist Poland experienced what has been described as a sudden, intense and widespread outburst of anti-Jewish mood," including allegations that Jews were to blame for Poland's "decline" during the communist years, and Jew-baiting of political opponents during election campaigns. More recent efforts have emerged from a wide range of sources in the Polish community to challenge these conceptions of Jews and to foster a pluralistic society in Poland. The term Żydokomuna is now used almost exclusively by fringe nationalists associated with Radio Maryja, usually in reference to former communist party members and to "liberals" who have supported capitalist reforms, globalization and European integration. Organizations attacked as "Żydokomuna" have included the SLD and UW political parties, and Gazeta Wyborcza, whose editor-in-chief, Adam Michnik, is Jewish.

Recent debates on Żydokomuna

Postwar Polish-Jewish relations has lent itself to controversy, with debate over the Żydokomuna myth again being revived. Particularly recent studies by Jan T. Gross have revitalized the related issue, and outlined differences between Polish historiography and Jewish historiography. Some Polish historians are critical of recent studies by Jan T. Gross on anti-Jewish violence in Poland during and after World War 2. Historian Joanna Michlic has written that post-1989 Polish historiography has seen a revival of what she calls an ethnonationalist historical approach with the works of authors such as Marek Jan Chodakiewicz, Piotr Gontarczyk, Bogdan Musiał, and Tomasz Strzembosz. During the debate over Gross's work, Gross and his supporters characterized Żydokomuna as an antisemitic cliché while to some of the more extreme right-wing nationalist of Gross’s critics Żydokomuna was a fact of history. According to Joanna B. Michlic, among some Polish historians, "Judeo-communism served the purpose of rationalizing and explaining the participation of ethnic Poles in killing their Jewish neighbors and, thus, in minimizing the criminal nature of the murder."

One of Gross' critics, Marek Jan Chodakiewicz, stressed that after the Soviet takeover of Poland in 1945 violence had developed amid postwar retribution and counter-retribution, exacerbated by the breakdown of law and order and a Polish anti-Communist insurgency. According to Chodakiewicz, some Jewish "avengers" endeavored in extracting justice from the Poles who harmed Jews during the War and in some cases Jews attempted to reclaim property confiscated by the Nazis. These phenomena further reinforced the stereotype of Żydokomuna, a Jewish-Communist conspiracy in post-war Poland. Chodakiewicz claims that after World War Two, the Jews were not only victims, but also aggressors. He describes cases in which Jews cooperated with the Polish secret police, denouncing Poles, members of the Home Army. Chodakiewicz claims some 3500 to 6500 Poles died in late 1940s because of Jewish denunciations or were killed by Jews themselves. Historian Antony Polonsky has strongly criticized Chodakiewicz' account, writing that Chodakiewicz exaggerates the Jewish presence in the post-war communist government, fails to take into account what Polonsky calls the widespread character of antisemitism in postwar Poland, and appears to hold all Jews responsible for the crimes committed by the communists, whether of Jewish origin or not. Genocide scholar Omer Bartov has written that "recent writings and pronouncments seem to indicate that the myth of the Żydokomuna (Jews as communists) has not gone away." Bartov cites younger Polish scholars, including Chodakiewicz, whom he describes as claiming that Poland's Jewish citizens were disloyal to it during the Soviet occupation and therefore had to be suppressed by the state, and attributes these historical reconstructions as being relective of a right wing turn in contemporary Polish politics.

The debate in scholarship regarding to the origins and evolution of the żydokomuna myth still continues.

External links

• Jews,Communism,and the Jewish Communists

See also

• Massacre of Brzostowica Mala
• Jewish Bolshevism
• Kielce pogrom
• Bund
• Zionist-Occupied Government
• History of the Jews in Russia and the Soviet Union: Jews and Bolshevism

Further reading

• Template:Pl icon August Grabski, "Działalność komunistów wśród Żydów w Polsce (1944-1949)", Trio, Warszawa 2004, ISBN 8388542877
• Template:Pl icon Krystyna Kersten, Polacy, Żydzi, Komunizm. Anatomia półprawd 1939-68, Warszawa: Niezależna Oficyna Wydawnicza, 1992, ISBN 8370540260