Michael Malice

So when they were seizing power, Trotsky explicitly said, I can't be in charge, I'm Jewish.

So the Soviet Union remained extremely antisemitic.

One of the reasons so many Jews became communists in the Soviet Union, because the promise was once the communists took over, we're not going to have pogroms anymore.

Pogroms was you had these Jewish ghettos and under the permission or encouragement of the czar,

just gangs of people go through killing, raping, robbing, stealing, rioting for days.

And just, it was just a complete massacre.

And the idea is like under communism, everyone's going to be equal.

We're not going to have this anymore.

They still had it, but to a lesser extent, but, uh,

Since Trotsky was Jewish, his real name is Lev Bronstein, it was almost impossible to have a scenario where he was going to be in charge.

And Stalin fed into that to some extent.

Also, this kind of idea of Jewish internationalism, it's like, okay, he doesn't really have loyalty to Russia.

And many of the people who were Jewish who were high up in Stalin's...

government administration, they very much had to prove their loyalty to communism as opposed to Judaism.

Well, it's the kind of thing where if something was bad, there's this Russian rhyme.

Like, if there's no water in the sink, who drank it?

All the Jews.

So if something goes wrong, there's just a convenient historical scapegoat.

It's the Jews' fault.

So this is something that's towards the end of his life very much, and this was after World War II, Stalin was getting ready for another kind of series of programs.