Lenin's Jewish Question

by Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern

In this first examination of Lenin’s genealogical and political connections to East European Jews, Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern reveals the broad cultural meanings of indisputable evidence that Lenin’s maternal grandfather was a Jew. He examines why and how Lenin’s Jewish relatives converted to Christianity, explains how Lenin’s vision of Russian Marxism shaped his identity, and explores Lenin’s treatment of party colleagues of Jewish origin and the Jewish Question in Europe. Petrovsky-Shtern also uncovers the continuous efforts of the Soviet communists to suppress Lenin’s Jewishness and the no less persistent attempts of Russian extremists to portray Lenin as a Jew. In this fascinating book, Petrovsky-Shtern expands our understanding not only of Lenin, but also of Russian and Soviet handling of the Jewish Question.

Genres: History, Jewish, Russian History

225 pages, Hardcover

First published August 31, 2010

Reviews

[Naomi Baker · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is not really about whether or not Lenin was Jewish. It is an established fact that his great-grandfather and father were ethnic shtetl Jews from the Pale, who converted to Christianity.

Lenin did not care about a person's ethnicity or nationality, as his focus was on revolution and class, and whether individuals were for or against his policies. It was only after his death, when people started researching his background for biographies, that his great-grandparents and their origins were discovered. From Stalin until Gorbachev, this information was carefully suppressed. Researchers and archivists who found documentation of his origins were harassed, threatened and fired from their positions, and the materials were sealed and put into Central Committee state archives.

The reason is more than any anti-semitism by subsequent leaders of the USSR. Rather, the myth that the Revolution and its founder were pure Russian, that although ethnicities and nationalities were to be subsumed under the glorious international proletarian society, it was an open secret that Russians were more equal than others. The purity of Lenin's Russian character was essential to this myth. It was not until the fall of the USSR and the opening of the archives that the collected and hidden documents came to public light.

Contents cover: a biography of Lenin's great-grandfather and his hatred of his fellow Jews, his baptizing of his sons and himself; quotes from Lenin's writings illustrating his indifference to ethnicities; attempts by researchers and relatives of Lenin to discover and publish about his roots. I found it very readable and engaging.

[Elliot Ratzman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Students always ask me—they heard a rumor—if Hitler was Jewish, but Lenin? Apparently Lenin’s great-grandfather was a conniving Russophile, self-hating Shtetl dweller right out of an I.B.Singer story who filed enough lawsuits to leave a papertrail in the Russian archives. Lenin’s grandfather converted to Russian Orthodoxy, and the memory of a Jewish lineage was forgotten. Lenin’s maternal family background was suppressed by decades of Soviet officials already coping with the large numbers of Jewish revolutionaries; Stalin needed a pure Russian Lenin to fuse Russian national sentiment with the Revolution. In recent decades, Lenin’s ancestry has been revised by right-wing, pro-Stalin (he was a *real* Russian!) anti-Semites who assert a Jewish Lenin proves Bolshevism was an alien import, destroying Russian culture, religion and civilization. Scary, if fascinating, material, but this was probably the most charming and funny work of Russian-Jewish history I’ve read, which isn’t saying much.

[Charles · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Lenin's Jewish Question, the author, Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, delves into a problem that has plagued Soviet and Russian elites for almost a century: What to do with Vladimir Lenin's Jewish background. The author says it was an error to write this book, because it might play into the antisemitism prevalent in Russia today. His rationale was that a book discussing Lenin's Jewish background would bolster the argument that the Russian Revolution had been a Jewish Revolution, in which Jews, in their quest to rule the world, had brought an evil doctrine (Marxism/Communism) into Mother Russia and tainted her society, culture and politics. But I am glad he wrote this book. As life with the Internet has demonstrated, people will take facts/information and twist and distort them in any which way they please. And the author provides plenty of information to digest. His mastery of Jewish history and culture and of the history and politics of Eastern Europe, czarist Russia, the Soviet Union and the fall of the Communist state is well evident. The story of Lenin's great grandfather, Moishe Blank, a Jew from the Pale of Settlement, has been known for almost a century but it has been concealed by Soviet/Russian authorities for much of that time for various reasons. The book is not a biography of Lenin in any stretch of the imagination, but the author does offer an interesting sketch of Blank and his Christianized descendants. The most fascinating part of the book for me is the author's analysis of how the fact of Lenin's heritage has been handled and mishandled over the years. My only quibble with the book is the lack of a bibliography. Although some authors/publishers say let the footnotes handle the bibliographic information, it can be a daunting task for the reader to parse out that information (particularly if most of the citations are not in English). Again, a minor quibble. Petrovsky-Shtern is the author of other works on Jews in Eastern Europe/Russia and I am adding them to my want to read list. Peace.