COMMUNISM
Communism is a political, economic and social system, as well as an ideology, that had its roots in the former Soviet Union. In a communist system, the government controls the economy; all goods are shared equally by the people. The notion of equality enhanced the appeal of communism for the masses; however, the denial of political and economic freedom and the absence of social class inherently pitted communism against democracy and capitalism. Communists widely reject the term “communist state”, since a communist society by their definition is a state-less society. The terms used by the communist movement to describe these states are either socialist states or ‘people’s democracies’.
Karl Marx is universally regarded as the father of communism. Along with his colleague Friedrich Engels, Marx published the Communist Manifesto in 1848. In keeping with Marxist theory, communists believe that the working class (proletariat) of the world must unite and overthrow the capitalist society in order to form a co-operative communist society where private property is done away with. Two decades later, Marx alone published Das Kapital, a lengthy critique of capitalism.
The Communist Party of the Soviet Union emerged as the ruling political party in the Soviet Union in 1912; this led to the establishment of a socialist state. The Soviet Union, in fact, became the model for future communist regimes. Jews held influential roles in the Soviet Union until Leon Trotsky was forced into exile in 1929. What followed was the totalitarian reign of Stalin, dominated by collective ownership, oppressive control of art and literature, and violent repression of religion. Stalin, therefore, was not at all accepting of the Jewish presence. By the middle of the 1930s, anti-Semitism dominated the political scene, and prominent Jews were eliminated from their positions of power. Jews’ perceived role in the Russian revolution, coupled with the fact that Karl Marx was himself Jewish, intensified hatred of the Jews, stirred up particularly by Adolf Hitler during the 1920s.
After World War II ended and the State of Israel was created, another peak in antisemitism occurred. Even though the Soviet Union voted for the establishment for the State of Israel in the United Nations, the communists viewed Zionism in the Soviet Union as Jewish separatism, contrary to the Russian socialist cause, and declared it a crime against the State. Thus, many leading Russian Jews who were avid Zionists were persecuted for their questionable affinity. Not surprisingly, this resulted in the mass departure of hundreds of thousands of Jews from the Soviet Union, who made their homes either in Israel or the United States.
During the mid-1940s, Russia began to spread communism voraciously, aiming to dominate the capitalist world and to establish communist nations in their stead. In Eastern Europe, communism emerged at the end of World War II, and remained active until 1990. The devastation of World War II among capitalist strongholds such as France and Britain, which were suffering from shortages of food, clothing, and medical