Stalin Vs. Schneerson

[Ian David]

When asked in the 1960s what the impact of the French Revolution had been, Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai famously said: "It’s too early to tell."

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The Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneerson (1880-1950). By Miriam Teleshevski. Artbymiriam.com


If there was ever a battle fought in vain, this was it.

The year was 1924. Vladimir Lenin, father of the communist revolution, died. Joseph Stalin, serving as the General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, prevailed in a power struggle over Leon Trotsky, and became the undisputed dictator of the Soviet Union. During the following thirty years, Stalin would murder over 20 million of his own people, purging the country of all opposition to the “party.”

Jews and Judaism would become one of Stalin’s primary targets. The Yevsektsiya -- the Jewish section of the communist party – would successfully crush and uproot every facet of Jewish religion and culture. It would ensure that Russian Jewry in its millions embraces the paradise of communism, a paradise -- they would soon come to learn -- constructed of bullets and gulags.

At his home in Leningrad (today Petersburg), a 44-year-old rabbi, heir to some of the great spiritual leaders of Russian Jewry, summoned nine young disciples. He offered them an opportunity most would refuse: to take responsibility for the survival of Judaism in the Soviet Union; to ensure that Jewish life and faith would survive the hellish darkness of Stalin’s regime. He asked them to fight “till the last drop of blood,” in his words.

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