Bolsheviks and JewsThe jubilation with which Jews had greeted the overthrow of the czar was
short-lived. The Bolshevik revolution in November 1917 swept away the
Provisional Government and marked the onset of a civil war between the
“Reds” (the Bolsheviks) and the “Whites” (supporters of the czarist regime
who were helped by the Allies). Russian Jews were caught in the middle;
accused of Bolshevist sympathies by the Whites and attacked as members
of the hated bourgeoisie by the Reds, they suffered economic and cultural
deprivation if not torture and mass executions. Jews reported that some
pogroms were incited by the Germans, and Schiff too called for an end to
the “Bolshevik German terror.” But no matter who the instigators were,
the atrocities proved that the end of czarist rule had not eradicated Russian
anti-Semitism.^10
The complexities of the situation put American Jewish leaders in a no-
win position. To side with the Reds, the enemies of private property and
religion, particularly when the United States sent a military expedition into
Russia to curb the Bolshevik troops, was thoroughly unpalatable. To side
with the Whites, the representatives of an anti-Semitic old regime that was
anathema to the eastern European immigrants, was equally unthinkable.
Moreover, any stand by American Jews threatened to fuel the wrath of the
other side and cause additional suffering for the victims. Appeals to the
president and State Department to warn the perpetrators that they would
be held accountable also failed. Lansing explained, in the wake of Jewish
massacres in the Ukraine, that intervention was impossible, since the
United States had no diplomatic relations with any of the groups strug-
gling for power.^11
The AJC gathered pertinent information on the Russian situation from
published articles and from knowledgeable Russians in America. Although
Schiff left most decision making to Marshall and the AJC during the last
years of his life, he still cultivated his own sources on the Russian problem.
A Mr. Kurbatov, introduced by Lord Swaythling (Samuel Montagu) and
identified by Schiff as a Cossack, discussed the persecutions with him. So
did A. J. Sack, director of the Russian Information Bureau in New York,
whose primary purpose was to propagandize on behalf of Admiral Alexan-
der Kolchak and the Whites. Without the cooperation of the American
government, however, there was little that the committee or Schiff could
do. Even relief drives were stymied as long as the money could fall into the
wrong hands. Meanwhile, Schiff withdrew his offer of a medical unit for
Russian Jews that he had made in April 1917, and he wrote off his loan of 1
million rubles to the pre-Bolshevist regime as a total loss.^12
Most worrisome to the Jewish stewards was the linkage of Jew with
242 Jacob H. Schiff