I have in front of me a new book by Tross Publishing, which I have been invited to review. Having written a chapter or two for the publisher, it is my unpleasant job not just to recommend you not buy it, but that the publisher withdraw it. (Recommending withdrawal is not a matter of "free speech" -- the right to speak includes the right to take the consequences, including criticism -- simply a recommendation for good editorial hygiene.) Withdraw, because it sits poorly with his other titles, because it sits badly with genuine scholarship on any subject. ...
... and because it's not even a good read.
There had been a revolution that swept away the Tsar -- swept away him and his autocratic regime -- what Ayn Rand was to call "the good revolution." But it wasn't the Bolsheviks who revolted against the Tsar's regime; they came to power instead in a squalid little backdoor coup eight months later -- orchestrated in part by the Imperial German High Command, who had sent Lenin into Russia to kill the war on their terms -- a backroom revolt that stabbed in the back the Provisional Government and squashed like a bug Russia's first stumbling chance at real freedom.
The Bolsheviks didn't sweep away oppression; they brought it back.
And our friend Mr Asher has now written 93 pages (and 5 pages of notes) to tell us who really did it. And oddly, the important wartime context is never mentioned ...
The wartime context of the coup. (From Louis Fischer's
The Life of Lenin (NY: Harper & Row, 1964), p. 109
ELEANOR ROOSEVELT WAS SUPPOSED TO have said that "Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people."
And as they say, a footnote is a device for lending an air of scholarship to a lie. A manufactured quote might be imagined better -- except these days it's easier to check.
This short book claims to reveal who was really behind the Bolshevik Revolution. Really and truly. And it will do so, we are promised, "with meticulous care and references" [p. 5; all uncredited page notes will refer to Mr Asher (2026)]. Take careful note: This is not a book about the ideas that caused the event in question. It is about the people. And, spoiler alert, our author says it was the Jews wot dunnit. They were driven to it, says the author, because they were Jews.
That's it. That really is it.
And note the argument: it wasn't that those who driven to it because they happened to be Jews. They were driven to it because they were Jews. It was "vengeance," says our author, for earlier Russian pogroms against Jews. Or just because their religion was weird. Or ... something.
A remarkable claim, not least because head Bolshevik and the revolution's driving force was one Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, who was not at all Jewish. (He was raised in a Russian Orthodox Christian family, baptised as an infant, and identified culturally and ethnically as Russian; historians who have examined distant links, such as the author of Lenin's Jewish Question, emphasise any link was irrelevant to his identity, ideology, or actions: he critiqued all religion, including Judaism, and saw ethnicity as secondary to class struggle). Nor was Lenin's successor known as Stalin any more Jewish (he was, famously, an ethnic Georgian christened as Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili), and nor was the head of Lenin's feared secret police, the Cheka (the brutal Feliz Dzerzhinsky, who was a Pole).
None of the heads of the snake were Jewish.
Indeed, of the 21 members of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party in August 1917, there were at most just six who could be categorised that way. Such niceties however do not disturb our author. (Indeed, he adds three more, without any reference for doing so.)
And in any case.a similar ethnic make-up can be found for many other Russian movements of the time, including the Russian Orthodox priesthood, the rival Menshevik party (whose founders were both Jewish, and which actually had double the proportion of ethnic Jews to the Bolshies), and of course the Jewish Bund (a secular Jewish socialist party active between 1897 and 1920). A similar make-up can be found because any intellectual movement attracts intellectuals -- and Jewish Russians were among the most educated of the time, and were barred by the Tsar's regime from other political involvement.
So the claim is not just remarkable for being bold, but also (as we will see) for lacking the kind of "meticulous care and references" the boldness demands. It's true that historians of the various Russian revolutions and coups d'etat have generally recognised that Jews were represented in early Bolshevik leadership, but so were many other educated ethnic minorities who all faced persecution under the Tsar. (Most of whom were excluded by being non-Russian from advancement in Russian culture or in the vast Russian bureaucracy.) And of course the vast majority of Jews were not Bolsheviks, and Jews as a community suffered enormously under Soviet rule.
This is especially important today to understand. The book comes at a time when ethnic Russian fascism and anti-Semitism has escalated dramatically following Putin's insane aspirations for empire, and Hamas's murderous October 7 attack followed by Israel's bloody response. (Here in New Zealand, once considered a relatively safe environment for Jewish folk, the NZ Jewish Council recorded 227 antisemitic incidents in the 12 months following October 7 -- more than the 166 recorded across the entire eight-and-a-half years prior.)
So things are ramping up, and you might well ask yourself about such a book's publication: "Why now?"
And about the thesis, even if proven: "So what?"
WHILE YOU PONDER THOSE QUESTIONS, consider again what such a proof might look like -- proof that it was the Jews wot dunnit -- and about that promise of "meticulous care and references."
Let's begin by looking at some contemporary (or near-contemporary) quotes adduced by Mr Asher to describe the Bolshevik coup and the Jews' alleged responsibility for it: some examples drawn from a diplomat's alarmed despatch, a gossip columnist's interview, a White Russian general's memoir, and a State Department intelligence file drawing on a known forgery -- all of which are treated as equivalent historical evidence ...
**** The first chapters recount the history before and of the revolutions, which rely for their veracity largely on Alan Moorehead's excellent book The Russian Revolution. Which is fine, except Moorehead's book itself is almost entirely unsourced (it's a 'popular history' without footnotes, with three pages of notes only of general sources used) and was published in 1958, long before Soviet archives were opened to reveal much of the revolutions' precise mechanics and personnel. More recent, and better sourced works, should have been used.**** In any case, these early chapters are notable only for declaring that with political advancement closed off to them "young Jews ... went underground and formed cells to promote their one great aim which was the imposition of socialism." There is no source for the claim, but we are introduced to Douglas Reed and his 1978 book The Controversy of Zion, which will feature heavily in later chapters.The thesis of Reed's book is not just that 'the Jews done this,' but 'the Jews done everything.'According to Reed, the "Tribe of Judah" are not just behind every curtain and under every bed, but their "Talmudic Zionism" (Reed's term) is the centuries-long driving force behind revolutions, communism, world wars, and efforts to establish a secretive world government dominated by Jewish leaders. So for Reed, this is just one revolution among many on which to hang the Jews.(How come Reed's work was only published posthumously and is not taken seriously by historians? Because (of course) the truth is being suppressed.)
*** Another claim in these chapters is said to come from the 1905 (pre-revolution) Jewish Encyclopedia, a major work (now online) published in New York by Funk and Wagnall seeking to bolster knowledge of and pride in Jewish achievement. It's in that context that its entry on 'Socialism' boasts: "While in Germany socialism has attracted individual Jews, in Russia it has become a movement of the Jewish masses." Our author takes the latter clause, treats it as a sentence, and adds to it the fictional words: "The passion of many Jews to socialise the world was not confined to Russia." The Encyclopaedia does not say that. Our Mr Asher does.
"Meticulous care"?
As you'll see, this kind of "citation laundering" is endemic. There's a pattern. Fictional quotes are added to respected scholars to lend to the claim an aura of authenticity. And authors are quoted accurately when there is no basis to the author's claim.And as they say, a footnote is a device for lending an air of scholarship to a lie. A manufactured quote might be imagined better -- except these days it's easier to check.
Let's continue with quotes from the time of revolution itself when, as you might imagine, rightly alarmed reporters, diplomats and others rushed to comment. Several of these are quoted to support the author's thesis, often without attribution -- so I had to hunt them down myself. Fortunately, many are now online:
He was too far-seeing.
Funding for the Bolshevik coup came primarily "from the German state,
Second, Churchill's entire purpose is to argue the opposite of a Jewish conspiracy thesis. He explicitly states that "the Bolshevik movement is not a Jewish movement" and calls upon loyal Jews everywhere to repudiate it and make this clear to the world.
Third, Churchill argues that "this is an injustice on millions of helpless people, most of whom are themselves sufferers from the revolutionary regime" -- explicitly exonerating the vast majority of Jews from any association with Bolshevism.
Reed argued that the true start of the conspiracy occurred on a day in 458 BC when "the petty Palestinian tribe of Judah produced a racial creed, the disruptive effect of which on subsequent human affairs may have exceeded that of explosives or epidemics. This was the day on which the theory of the master-race was set up as 'the Law'." Everything that followed — Christianity, Islam, the French Revolution, Bolshevism, Zionism, the World Wars — is in Reed's framework a consequence of this original Jewish "declaration of war."
And if we are to be blunt, the problems had already started right on page 1. It's already all right there.
And so too does Mr Asher have a hard time making his own claim. Perhaps the simplest reflection to make on that is if Jewish ethnic identity or a supposed Jewish conspiracy explained revolutionary radicalism, then Jews would have been concentrated in the most radical party -- the Bolsheviks. But they weren't. Before 1917, only 958 Jews had joined the Bolshevik Party. Most Jewish socialists tended to go for the Jewish Labour Bund or for Menshevik gradualism. Instead they were proportionally more numerous in the more moderate Menshevik faction -- the founders of which (Julius Martov and Pavel Axelrod), were both Jewish. In their Menshevik party, the Jewish proportion was twice as high as in the Bolshevik party (20% as opposed to the Bolshevik's 10%).
The fact is that educated Jewish individuals were drawn to revolutionary politics generally because of persecution, discrimination, and the promise of equality -- not because of any coordinated ethnic agenda.
And the Jewish revolutionary was typically, as Trotsky exemplified, someone who had rejected Jewish identity in favour of internationalism. When Leon Trotsky was asked what his nationality was, he replied simply "socialist."
**** Our own Otago Daily Times republished Press Association reports that "[t]he Red Commissaries are mostly Jews..." which our book faithfully reports [p. 47], omitting further "news from Vladivostock" that "most of the commanding officers in the Red army are Germans, who are introducing German methods." (One can read the whole piece online now at the Papers Past website.)
**** David Francis, a Missouri businessman and Democratic party operative was rewarded with an ambassadorship to Russia despite his thorough lack of knowledge of either language or culture, wired that "most of] the Bolshevik leaders ... are Jews." [p. 45] This was his personal perception, of course, not a verified demographic study. (His note appears here without citation, but it comes originally from his 1921 memoir Russia from the American Embassy 1916-18. The passage is most frequently circulated these days from an article by IHR director Mark Weber (whom we'll meet again later): "The Jewish Role in the Bolshevik Revolution and Russia's Early Soviet Regime," and "Jewish Involvement in the Bolshevik Revolution," by John Wear, found at something called "Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust.")
**** Another is from Dutch ambassador M. Oudendyke, representing the British in St Petersburg in a disintegrating embassy, who cabled Arthur Balfour (he of the famous Declaration) to say that Bolshevism "is organised and worked by Jews who have no nationality." [p. 45] Yet Balfour decided not to include this statement in the finalised White Paper to which this book has it referenced -- it first (re)appeared in a book by Archibald Ramsay (a Scottish MP interned during the Second World War for pro-Nazi sympathies) before it resurfaced in Douglas Reed's The Controversy of Zion, and now appears like a guest star almost exclusively almost exclusively on Holocaust denial and white nationalist websites. (It also featured in speeches by Goebbels!)**** London's Times reported on 29 March, 1919, that: "Of the twenty or thirty commissaries or leaders who provide the central machinery of the Bolshevist movement not less than 75% are Jews." [p. 47] The quote itself is accurate but, rushed out in the midst of Civil War and widespread Western fears of Bolshevik spread, the figure is not. Which deserves a discussion.Of the 22 Politburo members working alongside Lenin from March 1918 to March 1919, there were seven ethnic Jews, nine Russians, three Latvians, one Ukrainian, one Pole, and one Georgian. Seven out of twenty-two is approximately 32% -- significant overrepresentation relative to the Jewish share of the population, but nowhere near 75%.Further, of the 21 members of the Bolshevik Central Committee, only five were Jewish. Almost all of the Politburo, the policymaking arm of the Communist Party, were non-Jews.
The honest historical picture is one of significant but not dominant overrepresentation at leadership level, concentrated in certain departments, declining markedly through the 1920s and catastrophically in the Stalinist purges -- when Jews were disproportionately among the victims.
**** English chemist A. Homer told London's Catholic Herald in an article published Oct/Nov 1933, just as Nazi antisemitism was becoming German state policy, that "The Soviet movement was a Jewish and not a Russian conception." This is quoted here. [p. 47]You might like to know that the full title of his article, an opinion piece and not a report, is 'Judaism and Bolshevism: A Challenge and a Reply. Some facts concerning Bolshevism, Judaism, Christianity and international (Jew-controlled) finance, Bolshevism and Zionism'. Our author uses the quote and omits the article's title.You might also like to know that a digitised copy of the article is held by the University of Sheffield's Special Collections, which holds a copy, describes it plainly as "strongly anti-Semitic." The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum also holds a copy -- which gives you a sense of how the document is now categorised, and the company our author is keeping.**** Shall I go on? Hilaire Belloc is quoted to say: "As for anyone who does not know that the present revolutionist Bolshevist movement is Jewish in Russia, I can only say that he must be a man who is taken in by the suppression of our deplorable Press." [p. 47] The quote's source is said to be a 4 Feb 1937 magazine from GK Chesterton called GK's Weekly.First of all, Chesterton died on 14 June 1936, and after his death the publication changed was renamed The Weekly Review. But it is sourced this way in a 1938 anti-semitic pamphlet by Irish Catholic priest Fr Denis Fahey, replete with cherrypicked quotations from Belloc, Chesterton, and other Catholic "distributist" figures. So our Mr Asher cites it, I suspect, without checking the original.What's a "distributist," I hear you ask? Explaining it all to a modern audience, Veronique de Rugy says of Belloc himself that "you don’t have to be a sensitive Gen-Zer to realize that this French-English polymath was, to put it mildly, problematic. He was an antisemite as well as an admirer of fascism and Benito Mussolini. But I guess he was supposedly a devout Christian, though he described Jesus as 'a milksop' and apparently personally found him 'repellent.' About the Apostle Paul he simply said that he was 'a muddleheaded old Yid.' Do whatever you want with this information."In any case, 1937 is of course a long way from being any kind of contemporary report. In 1922, earlier to the time of the Bolshevik coup, this noted antisemite as well as an admirer of fascism published The Jews. It read mostly as you might expect, except much of it directly contradicts Asher's thesis. First, Belloc explicitly rejected the idea of "a vast age-long plot, culminating in the contemporary Russian affair," saying it "will not hold water." Second, Belloc argued that hostility toward Jews on account of Bolshevism was wrong, writing that Jews had "reasons for action and excuse for action which men of our race would not have had" and that the provocation of Bolshevism ought not to "warp our attempted solution of the Jewish problem." Third, and most devastatingly for Asher's purposes, Belloc explicitly stated that "you will never make a Communist of the highly-civilised, tenacious, intelligent and humorous Occidental European" — suggesting he saw Bolshevism as a transient phenomenon rather than an enduring Jewish world conspiracy.
**** Note that many of these quotes here and elsewhere in the book are either not sourced (I've had to find them myself) or are found in or footnoted to a book by that Fr Denis Fahey (mentioned above) called The Mystical Body of Christ, which is as confusing as the author (a fascist would-be theocrat) is problematic. Confusing because Fahey wrote two books of that name, and our Mr Asher fails to give us either a date or a publisher in his footnote (" ... meticulous care and references ...").
The first book, The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World, was published by Browne and Nolan Limited in 1938-39. The Internet Archive describes it plainly as "a rare Irish piece of antisemitica." Its chapter headings are revealing — they include "The Agents of Revolution," "The Struggle of the Jewish Nation Against the True Messias," and appendices on Jewish Power, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Freemasonry, and Germany. Whatever we are looking at here, it's not scholarship.
You may judge the second book The Mystical Body of Christ and the Reorganization of Society, published in 1945, by its index -- which on its own a remarkable document. It lists among its subjects B'nai B'rith, Communism, the Federal Reserve Board, Freemasonry, Adolf Hitler, the Jewish Nation, Jacob Schiff, Trotsky, Max Warburg, usury, ritual murder, and world revolution — virtually every trope of antisemitic conspiracy literature assembled in one place, all given a Catholic theological framework.
We are clearly in deep waters here, and there is a pattern: oft-genuine documents written either by panicked diplomats in extremis or by anti-semites on reflection -- orjust cherrypicked to remove context -- and now kept alive as little bullets to fire that are hosted for publication almost exclusively by Holocaust deniers and neo-Nazis (like California's Institute for Historical Review (that's the IHR mentioned above), which is described by the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial website as "the focal point of world neo-Nazi propaganda since 1978.") Published, and then kept alive without the necessary context.
*** William Huntington's testimony is a good example of this. Huntington was a young engineer attached to the US embassy for 2 years until September, 1918. Testifying to the US Congress's Overman Committee, which was hastily hoovering up all the stories and "hearsay" they could about the cataclysm (their own description of much of the testimony), Huntington was asked about the leaders' religion (not their race), replying: "The leaders of the [Bolshevik] movement, I should say, are about two-thirds Russian Jews." [p. 45] This is all that is quoted. Huntington however hastens to add:
It is only fair, however, to say that the best of the Hebrew people in Russia, among whom are some of the finest in the world, and the greatest strugglers for human liberty in the world, have disapproved of this thing and have always disapproved it, and fear its consequences for their own people.
But to find that, our Mr Asher would have had to go back to the original source (to which I link above). But his source instead is Father Fahey.
*** Another good example is Belgian diplomat Charles Sarolea (a literary scholar and linguist). Sarolea is quoted to say: "The Jewish leaders are the masters of Russia." [p. 47] This too is sourced only to Father Fahey's tract(s). But like many of these quotes, they come from books now available online -- in this case Impressions of Soviet Russia published in 1924 -- and so we may check them for accuracy and their full context. And the fuller context reveals a very thoughtful Sarolea indeed.
[I]n Russia, as I explained before, the worst crimes have not been committed by common criminals, they have been committed by “ honest maniacs,” by “ ascetic puritans.” As for the Jewish Bolshevists, it is quite true that they have played a dominant part in some of the most cruel acts of terrorism. But the Bolshevist Jews did not commit their crimes because they were Jews, but because they were Marxian fanatics. They had cut themselves loose from their own people, and they proved the worst enemies of their race.
The sinister truth is that the Bolshevists belong neither to Russia nor to Palestine [i.e, to what is now Israel], neither to Lettland nor to Poland. The Bolshevists, whether Jews or Poles, whether Letts or Russians, immolated their victims to a system in the name of a principle. As was said by Lenin himself, “ What does it matter if ninety per cent, of the Russian people perish, provided the surviving ten per cent, be converted to the Communist faith.” And it is because from the very beginning the Bolshevists were the devotees of an inhuman creed and the slaves of a machine, that we are fully justified in our conclusion that their crimes are the logical outcome of their principles, and that organised terrorism may be called with literal truth the “ Red Harvest ” of Scientific Marxism. [p. 84, Impressions of Soviet Russia]
Amen.
Sarolea also talks about the "Recrudescence of Anti-Semitic Feeling of which Mr Asher's books is an ongoing part:
We have given the political and historical reasons which made it inevitable that the Jews should play the leading part in the Bolshevist Revolution, even as they were bound to play the leading part in the European Socialist movement. On the other hand, it was equally inevitable that the ignorant and embittered Russian masses should seek to make the whole Jewish people responsible for the crimes of the Bolshevist Revolution, and for the suffering and starvation it has brought in its train. Wherever there is widespread distress it is an invariable human instinct to try to find a scapegoat...
The Russian victims of Bolshevism have fastened on the Jew as the scapegoat. The result all over Russia and Central Europe has been an alarming recrudescence of anti-Semitic feeling ... Anti-Semitism is rampant even in the ranks of the Communist party, of the Red Bureaucracy and of the Red Army. When the Day of Judgment comes, some of the worst enemies of the Jews will be found amongst their Russian Bolshevist accomplices. They will turn King’s evidence; they will try to divert the anger of the mob from their own crimes and turn it against the Jews.
The most casual conversation with the “ man in the street” will convince the traveller of the intensity of this universal anti-Semitic passion. Even educated, humane and Christian people again and again would tell you that the wholesale extermination of the Jewish race — men, women and children — was an essential condition of the recovery of Russia. When I protested in horror against such monstrous sentiments, which out-Heroded the methods of Herod, my Russian friends would calmly reply, using the very same reasons as the wretches who slaughtered the Tsar’s family, that if Jewish women and children were to be spared the whole thing would have to be done over again in the coming generation -- that the only security for Russia was to make a clean job of it, and to extirpate once and for all the Jewish cancer from the Russian body politic. [p. 164-166, Impressions of Soviet Russia, ]
Sarolea concludes presciently with the horrified observation that, even in 1924, this "anti-Semitic feeling exist[s] in most countries, [and yet] it is not likely that any country will open its gates to the suffering millions of the Jewish proletariat. ...
A home will have to be found for those suffering millions outside Europe and America. Such a home cannot be found in Palestine. Emigration to Palestine would only touch the fringe of the problem. Only a country which is sufficiently vast and fertile, and whose population is sufficiently sparse, will be able to give refuge to the countless swarms of the Russian ghettos. Such a country can only be found in Southern Siberia and Central Asia. A mass settlement, a far-reaching scheme of colonisation in Asia, a Jewish State under the guarantee of the League of Nations, seems to me to be the only means of saving the Jewish people from certain destruction. [p.167Impressions of Soviet Russia]
eager to destabilise the enemy from within." [See WorldHistory.Org].
Our Mr Asher however claims to know better ...
MR ASHER ARGUES THAT THE BOLSHEVIK seizure of power (which I will persist in calling a coup) "was largely financed," we learn, "by Jewish money" [p.39]. This makes sense, we are told, because "Talmudic teachings are in line with the entire teaching of modern Finance-Capitalism, and also with the entire programme of materialistic enslavement known as Socialism and Communism." [p. 40] We are told this in a quote selected by our author from the unlikely source of one Arthur Nelson Field, a New Zealander known chiefly (if at all) for pre-war pamphlets claiming that the Great Depression was orchestrated by international financial cabals and by a "malevolent Jewish bankers' super-conspiracy."
Not the sort of fellow one would normally go to for deep analysis. But that's not what we're offered here.
I looked, for example, for a discussion of the Kaiser funding the Bolshevik coup, which was his well-documented bid to stop the war on German terms. But I looked in vain. (It was only the Jews wot dunnit.)
As to references for this particular claim of Mr Asher's, it rests on a State Department report that Jacob Schiff, of Kuhn Loeb and Co was "the primary perpetrator of a scheme of using Bolshevism in an effort to control the world economy" [p.42].
Sounds legit? Well yes, the report is real. But that report (Decimal File (861-00/5339), 13 November 1918 headed 'Bolshevism and Judaism') was simply a dumping ground for everything anyone had ever heard about the topic -- including memes lifted directly from the notorious 1903 forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion -- and as cited evidence it is about as reliable as a jailbird's protestations of innocence.
Schiff was in fact a deeply conservative banker and philanthropist -- and as a fierce opponent of Tsarist antisemitism he assuredly did fund anti-Tsarist activity. He funded almost any anti-Tsarist activity he could find. He famously provided substantial loans to Japan during the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05) explicitly as a blow against the antisemitic Tsarist regime, and he supported various revolutionary and opposition groups hostile to the Tsar. But as Kenneth Ackerman reports (whose 2016 book Trotsky in New York, 1917 investigated the claim thoroughly) the specific claim about him financing the Bolsheviks is unsupported, and is not corroborated by any documentary evidence from banking records or archives opened after 1991.
But it gets worse as it gets more into specifics.
Mr Asher's book claims "French sources stated" that Schiff gave the Bolsheviks $12 million, "while Schiff's grandson estimated it was $20 million." The claim has no source, which is telling, as this factoid has a traceable genealogy, so well-known it's become a piece of anti-semitic folklore:
- the "French sources" are Arsène de Goulevitch's untranslated book Czarism and Revolution, written in French by a White Russian general who was a committed anti-Bolshevik propagandist;
- the $12 million figure appears in Naomi W. Cohen's 1999 biography Jacob H. Schiff: A Study in American Jewish Leadership, who raises the claim only to dismiss it; and
- the '$20 million grandson' claim comes only from a 1949 gossip column in the New York Journal-American, in which Schiff's grandson John was quoted to boast his grandfather had given "about $20 million" for the triumph of Communism in Russia.
Why it's all so telling is that the claim began as a polemic by that White Russian emigré (the overwhelming majority of Jewish victims in Ukraine in 1919 were killed by White counter-revolutionary forces). It was then spread without evidence by the likes of George Knupfer (a Russian monarchist émigré) and then Henry Ford (whose newspaper The Dearborn Independent and its compilation The International Jew drew heavily on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion), before being added to the 1971 tome None Dare Call It Conspiracy with the 1949 bit of gossip attached like a cherry atop a dessert. From there it spread like wild thyme.
And our author gives it no source.
"Meticulous care and references"? What do you think.
**** "By his own admission," says the book [p. 44], "Jacob Schiff enabled the revolution that brought the Bolsheviks to power." There is no admission, and no source given for it. But if we go back to that "French source" above, we find that to be the first place the "admission" was aired. ("In April 1917, Jacob Schiff publicly declared that it was thanks to his financial support that the revolution in Russia had succeeded.") It was then picked up in that 1971 Conspiracy tome, recycled by other Conspiracy theorists, and then plonked down here without context.But the sleight of hand here, the missing context (not to mention all the missing un-cited sources) is that Schiff was declaring, in April, his pleasure at the success of what Ayn Rand called "the good revolution," i.e., the February revolution that toppled the Tsar and installed Kerensky. Even in the original jaundiced citation, this was six months before the Bolshevik coup of October.This is not history being written by our Mr Asher, it's a conjuring trick with a calendar.**** But wait, there's more!The chapter on Schiff closes with what our author clearly. thinks is a "slam-dunk quote." Times editor Wickham Steed wrote in his book Through Thirty Years about efforts to secure recognition of Bolshevik representation at the 1919 Versaille Peace Conference. "Steed wrote," says our author, that "The prime movers were Jacob Schiff, Warburg and other international financiers who wished above all to bolster up the Jewish Bolshevists in order to secure a field for German and Jewish exploitation of Russia." [p. 44]And Steed did write that. (Chalk one up for careful referencing, albeit without a page number.) But what Steed actually says (the passage appears in Volume II, page 301, in the section on the Bullitt Mission at the Paris Peace Conference) is to recount a conversation he claims to have had with Colonel House, in which he told House that Schiff and Warburg were the "prime movers" behind efforts to secure Bolshevik recognition. So this is Steed reporting what he said to House — it is his own allegation, not a documented fact, and not corroborated by other evidence. No evidence is adduced. And even if Schiff was "eager to secure recognition" of the Bolsheviks -- a separate claim Steed also makes -- it's a mile away from proving a conspiracy to exploit Russia through Bolshevism.Why does this matter? Because the primary source for the passage in the context claimed for it is a 2012 article by Kerry Bolton titled "Responses of International Capital to the Russian Revolutions," in the International Journal of Russian Studies. Bolton is the primary modern conduit through which the Steed passage, the Schiff allegations, and the broader "Jewish Bolshevism" literature have been recycled and given a veneer of scholarly respectability. Bolton uses it, incidentally, as a primary plank of his argument that international Jewish finance sponsored Bolshevism.
And who the hell is Kerry Bolton? Take a deep breath: He founded the Satanist neo-Nazi groups Order of the Left Hand Path and Black Order; co-founded the Church of Odin in 1980, a pro-Nazi neopagan organisation for "whites of non-Jewish descent"; was briefly secretary for the New Zealand Fascist Union in 1997, and in 2004 was secretary of the New Zealand National Front.
Remember I said "we are in deep waters"?!
I wasn't kidding.
OF COURSE, NO BOOK OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY disasters is complete without mentioning Winston Churchill. And sure enough, the old bluffer appears here to be quoted over several pages [pp. 48-50] from a 1920 piece under the title "Zionism versus Bolshevism: A Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People." It was not his finest hour.
The full text is available online and is authenticated by leading Churchill bibliographers. It must rank as one of the most startling chapters in Churchill's career -- a strange mixture of exceptional admiration for some Jewish qualities, deep loathing for what he called "international Jews," and an extraordinary passage amounting to an apology for the pogroms organised by White Russian forces (with whom Churchill was then engaged). "With the notable exception of Lenin," he notes, "the majority of the leading [Bolshevik] figures are Jews. Moreover, the principal inspiration and driving power comes from the Jewish leaders."
The full text is available online and is authenticated by leading Churchill bibliographers. It must rank as one of the most startling chapters in Churchill's career -- a strange mixture of exceptional admiration for some Jewish qualities, deep loathing for what he called "international Jews," and an extraordinary passage amounting to an apology for the pogroms organised by White Russian forces (with whom Churchill was then engaged). "With the notable exception of Lenin," he notes, "the majority of the leading [Bolshevik] figures are Jews. Moreover, the principal inspiration and driving power comes from the Jewish leaders."
But his note is mistaken: In the 1920s, of the 417 members of the Central Executive Committee, party Central Committee, and various other senior bodies combined, the Bolsheviks' own census suggests there were just 6% who were ethnic Jews. Even if massaged, this is far from Churchill's claim for a "majority" -- a claim he doesn't bother to source.
Second, Churchill's entire purpose is to argue the opposite of a Jewish conspiracy thesis. He explicitly states that "the Bolshevik movement is not a Jewish movement" and calls upon loyal Jews everywhere to repudiate it and make this clear to the world.
Third, Churchill argues that "this is an injustice on millions of helpless people, most of whom are themselves sufferers from the revolutionary regime" -- explicitly exonerating the vast majority of Jews from any association with Bolshevism.
And finally (which is important for a book published in 2026, and a decent scholar would point it out) Churchill himself later repudiated its central premise. By 1935, Churchill had already criticised the Nazis for the very beliefs he himself had expressed in his 1920 article. And in 1948, he was able to say that the Nazi view of Bolshevism being a worldwide conspiracy of left-wing Jews, which was ruining Germany and the world, was a "paranoid fantasy."
So Winston at least emerges with some honour.
SO, WHAT ABOUT THE PEOPLE WHO DUNNIT? Or who are alleged to. Around mid-book, we arrive at thirteen out of the book's 93 pages taken up with a roll call of Jews said to have been in the Bolshevik administration -- an indication of the importance of this roster to our author. So I checked the sourcing.
They are said to come from the 1920 edition of Robert Wilton's book The Last Days of the Romanovs, with additional support from Morning Post correspondent Victor Marsden.
Marsden was the English translator of the 1903 hoax Protocols of the Elders or Zion, and his figures [p. 31] are quoted not directly but from Father Fahy's book, which is also the source of the otherwise unattributed "data furnished by the Soviet press" [p. 31] that is attributed somehow to Marsden (a strange case of circular citation). So that seems unhelpful -- especially since no specific Soviet publication, date or page is given, and the Bolsheviks were actively suppressing ethnic identification as part of their internationalist ideology.
Wilton himself promoted antisemitic views on Bolshevism, portraying the Bolshevik coup and murders as driven by "alien" (Jewish) elements and emphasising Jewish individuals in key roles. So I looked for these lists in that 1920 edition of Wilton's book, which is online. Are they there? Are they bollocks. Our author tells us that "on page 29" of Wilton's book, Wilton states that he will give us these lists on pages 136-7. But he doesn't. Here are all three pages [click to enlarge]:
There's a simple reason for their absence: they were never there in the 1920 edition that our author references. It turns out too that subsequent English-language publishers also never included them because of widespread criticism for their being exaggerated, inaccurate, or fabricated.
So where do they come from? The lists themselves only appeared in contemporary publishing in the 1921 French edition (Les Derniers Jours des Romanofs), where they were added as an appendix or chapter allegedly compiled from "official records" to which Wilton claimed access. And now that the original book is out of copyright, the only place the lists can be found is in editions reprinted by the Holocaust-denying Institute for Historical Review who restored them to English-language editions when they republished it in 1993.
The "appendix" containing these lists was not original but added by Mark Weber, the IHR's director, to the 1993 reprint published by the so-called Legion for the Survival of Freedom, the parent organisation of the Institute for Historical Review, with a preface by Weber and ethnic appendices not present in the original 1920 English publication. This means (take a deep breath) that the ethnic lists that form the foundation of Asher's chapter were not part of the book's original English publication, were suppressed by Wilton's original publisher, and were only restored to English by Holocaust deniers seventy years later. (Oh, and another edition was published in 2018 by Ostara Publications, whom we encountered earlier as the publisher of Hilaire Belloc's The Jews -- and founded in 1999 to publish March of the Titans: The Complete History of the White Race --confirming it as a specialist press for this category of literature.)
We are in very deep waters indeed!
And our life-raft is quietly swimming away.
You'll also realise, if you do the back-checking of sources, that almost every time one of Mr Asher's sources quotes a figure denoting the number of Jewish commissars/leaders/officials/appratchicks, that their source for the figure is not direct evidence but is hearsay taken from Robert Wilton's lists. (e.g., Montgomery Shuyler's "384 commmissars" [p. 46]; Rev. George A. Simons's "388" People's Commissars [p.46] etc.] And even on the basic question of how many people sat on the Central Committee -- twelve or fifteen -- Wilton gets the number wrong. His figure of nine Jewish members out of twelve is contradicted by Soviet records showing six Jewish members out of fifteen. Wilton's lists are not just biased, they are factually inaccurate on verifiable points.
In any case, without undertaking the distasteful task of checking the records myself for Jewish-sounding names, it's sufficient to stipulate that every early-twentieth century Russian organisation of any intellectual pretension—even Orthodox priests!—would have a large if not disproportionate number of Jews. It wasn't a matter of conspiracy, but of education, which Jewish culture prized more highly than Russian. Hence the preponderance of Jewish names in any early-twentieth century Russian intellectual movement. (As the Bolsheviks took over, however, and more and more Jews fled, that preponderance quickly died. As did many of those Jews who remained.)
So what would it prove?
And I have to ask myself again: even if the book's claim were true, so what?
What would that tell us?
What ideas would it reveal that are wrong? That should be argued against?
That comes next.
WHY DID THEY DO IT? THIS IS KEY. Why, according to our author, did "the Jews" "mastermind it and carry it out"? The argument made by our Mr Asher boils down to: they did it because of their "strange religion." [p. 51]
And speaking of strange religions, we are back in support of that argument to our old friends fascist Father Fahey and his 1938 pamphlet The Rulers of Russia, and Douglas Reed and his 1978 conspiracy tract The Controversy of Zion. We are back to them because it is almost entirely these two upon whom this chapter rests for its authority -- for better and (mostly) worse.
Judaism, we are told, is a "naturalist and self-centred religion which has as its centre of gravity not the after-life of Christianity but the Jewish people themselves." [p. 51] By "naturalist" is meant a non-mystical form of religion seeking answers in the natural world. But, argues Father Fahey, "we must combat Jewish efforts to permeate the world with naturalism. In that sense, as there is only one divine plan for order in the world, every sane thinker must be an anti-Semite." Judge for yourself how objective such a thinker might be.
Judaism, we also discover, is "a declaration of war against the rest of humanity." [p. 52] Our authority for this, we are told, is Reed's book, which "traces its history."
Judaism, said Reed, is the imposition of a malicious Levitical priesthood in reaction to the Universalist tendencies present in Israel and in other cultures. He argued that this hostile Levitical cult believed that if its adherents didn't obey God, they would be persecuted, and if they did, they would destroy the Gentiles and rule the earth. According to Reed, persecution, revenge, and destruction were an integral part of their identity.
Making any kind of sense yet?
Reed argued that the true start of the conspiracy occurred on a day in 458 BC when "the petty Palestinian tribe of Judah produced a racial creed, the disruptive effect of which on subsequent human affairs may have exceeded that of explosives or epidemics. This was the day on which the theory of the master-race was set up as 'the Law'." Everything that followed — Christianity, Islam, the French Revolution, Bolshevism, Zionism, the World Wars — is in Reed's framework a consequence of this original Jewish "declaration of war."
The "declaration" he says can be understood in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Yes, he goes there, to that 1903 forgery perpetrated (most probably) by the Tsarist secret police. Reed's position on the celebrated anti-semitic hoax is subtle and duplicitous at the same time.
He argued that the common argument that the Protocols were an absolute plagiarism was misdirection, and that the political programme contained within was shown to be real by the statements of Disraeli and Bakunin concerning Jewish leadership of the World Revolution. He stated: "No proof is given that the document is what it purports to be, a minute of a secret meeting of Jewish Elders. In that respect, therefore, it is valueless. In every other respect it is of inestimable importance."
This is a remarkable intellectual manoeuvre -- simultaneously conceding that the Protocols are a forgery while arguing they are nonetheless essentially true -- and it epitomises the entire tradition Asher draws on.
Part of that tradition encompasses the protestant Martin Luther, quoted here [p. 55] to say "The sun never did shine on a more bloodthirsty and revengeful people than the Jews." Their "hatred of Christ," says Mr Asher in this tradition [p. 57], "would have made it easier for the Jewish masters of Bolshevism to murder Christians and raze their churches to the ground."
But so much comes from antisemitic Catholic writings (a frighteningly rich vein!) premised on the idea that Judaism is inherently treacherous and belligerent towards Christianity, and that Catholic doctrine obligates the faithful to oppose Judaism, regardless of the behaviour or beliefs of individual Jews. In this mode is E. Michael Jones's 2008 book The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and Its Impact on World History, quoted in this vein. ("By rejecting Christ they condemned themselves to worship one false God after another -- most recently communism and Zionism." [quoted on p. 59])
Jones himself earns his living today by promoting a narrative about evil Jews running the world to a small but growing fan base of disaffected Catholics and white nationalists. He counsels white racists to return to the Catholic faith because it provides a better platform than white nationalism to confront what he calls the evils of Jewish power. (A seductive siren-song for today's vice-president, perhaps?) Most recently, in his 2023 book The Holocaust Narrative, Jones's antisemiticsm has evolved from his long-held position that the Holocaust was a justified response to Jewish behaviour to outright Holocaust denial. "[T]he gas chamber myth fell apart," he says "during the Zuendel trials in Canada during the 1980s."
There is certainly a strange tradition here -- and it is the strange tradition embraced by this book.
IT WILL BE ARGUED THAT THIS review itself is part of the suppression of the real story. To wish away the "real facts."
Indeed, there are two whole chapters arguing, first, that the author's thesis can't be a conspiracy theory -- "the real liars are those, who, in denial of the evidence, scream 'conspiracy theory' and 'anti-Semitism' as if prompted by an automaton" [p. 89] -- and, second, that any objection to the thesis will be part of a programme of "Smearing the Truth Tellers." [p. 90]
That's the last chapter's title, imperious in begging the question. Is our Mr Asher a "truth teller"? I submit as evidence for my own thesis in that respect my evidence adduced above. Take it as you wish.
But as I said at the very head of this page, to make such a remarkable case as he attempts would demand remarkable proof. Accurate reporting. Ironclad sourcing of material. You can already see how threadbare that might be.
And if we are to be blunt, the problems had already started right on page 1. It's already all right there.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn is quoted there on page one, without a source, to confirm for us that it was the Jews that dunnit. And since it's Nobel-prize winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn for goodness' sake, we know his opinion is expected to be taken seriously.
You must understand [our author 'quotes' Mr Solzhenitsyn], the leading Bolsheviks who took over Russia were not Russians. They hated Russians. They hated Christians. Driven by ethnic hatred they tortured and slaughtered millions of Russians without a shred of human remorse. It cannot be overstated. Bolshevism was the greatest human slaughter of all time. The fact that most of the world is ignorant and uncaring about this enormous crime is proof that the global media is on the hands of the perpetrators.
In case you were left wondering, the author's very next paragraph tells us explicitly that "the perpetrators" were "mainly Jews."
So, since Alexander Solzhenitsyn said all this so many years ago, you might wonder how come we don't already know all this? Why do we need a ninety-page tract like our author's to reveal it to the world? Because, says our Mr Asher, "These facts have been successfully covered up by the Jewish controlled media, publishing interests and Hollywood which have dominated, if not controlled, Western thinking throughout the 20th and 21st centuries." [p. 5] This fact is itself stated as fact (despite also being unsourced.) But as Solzhenitsyn is (supposed) to have said above, "the global media is in the hands of the perpetrators"! And this despite Robert Wilton and Douglas Reed being "allowed" to make similar claims in the pages of The Times.
But like I said, it's all right there on page one:
- the author's thesis;
- the claims about suppression; and
- all wrapped up in a quote given without any reference ("with meticulous care and references"?) that it turns out is manufactured to fit.
Because just as you will search in vain for evidence of Jewish control and cover-up (our author simply assumes it) so too you will search in vain through Mr Solzhenitsyn's work for such a paragraph. No scholarly biographies, authorised editions, or reliable archives (e.g., the Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Center) confirm it as authentic.
That's because it's not there either. He didn't write it. You can read his books Two Hundred Years Together (available in partial English translations online, with an authorised English edition slated for release 2026) or in his other works like The Gulag Archipelago to see that, yes, he rightly critiques Soviet atrocities. But he does so without the ethnic framing in this quote. And without the conspiratorial and modern-sounding sentence about the "global media" being "in the hands of the perpetrators."
FOR THE RECORD, SOLZHENITSYN ATTRIBUTES much of the tragedy to ideological fanaticism and to Russian societal flaws, sharing responsibility for the bloodshed across ethnic lines. As do other historians.
All of course frame the context as part of the German plan to have Russia surrender on German terms.
Richard Pipes frames the Revolution itself, more precisely a Coup d'État, as an elitist, authoritarian power grab with deep roots in Russia's autocratic traditions.
Robert Conquest largely concurs, arguing that the regime's later horrors (Red Terror, purges, collectivisation famines) stemmed directly from Lenin's politics: his idealisation of violence and intolerance of dissent, and the view of revolution as requiring civil war led by a "vanguard" of the enlightened.
Marxists, of course, have the hardest job here, because their prophet told them to expect the revolution in the most, not the least, capitalistic of countries.
And so too does Mr Asher have a hard time making his own claim. Perhaps the simplest reflection to make on that is if Jewish ethnic identity or a supposed Jewish conspiracy explained revolutionary radicalism, then Jews would have been concentrated in the most radical party -- the Bolsheviks. But they weren't. Before 1917, only 958 Jews had joined the Bolshevik Party. Most Jewish socialists tended to go for the Jewish Labour Bund or for Menshevik gradualism. Instead they were proportionally more numerous in the more moderate Menshevik faction -- the founders of which (Julius Martov and Pavel Axelrod), were both Jewish. In their Menshevik party, the Jewish proportion was twice as high as in the Bolshevik party (20% as opposed to the Bolshevik's 10%).
The fact is that educated Jewish individuals were drawn to revolutionary politics generally because of persecution, discrimination, and the promise of equality -- not because of any coordinated ethnic agenda.
And the Jewish revolutionary was typically, as Trotsky exemplified, someone who had rejected Jewish identity in favour of internationalism. When Leon Trotsky was asked what his nationality was, he replied simply "socialist."
THE BOOK PROMISES TO MAKE its disreputable claim "with meticulous care and references"—which is what such a claim demands.
All this above however gives you an idea, right here, of the standard of care shown, and of the calibre of references and authors relied upon.
We don't exactly go back to anti-Semitic forgeries like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, but one does wonder if our author may have a copy near his desk. His cited authors certainly did.
Historians of Russia and revolution like Richard Pipes, Orlando Figes, Alexander Rabinowitch and Evan Mawdsley are not wanted here, except from which to cite oft-cherrypicked figures.
Serious histories on Jewish involvement in revolutionary movements could be learned from in works like Yuri Slezkine's The Jewish Century (2004) -- a sort of updating of that Jewish Encyclopaedia of a century earlier. Or Walter Laqueur's works on Zionism/Soviet history or more recent studies on Soviet Jews. Or Paul Hanebrink's 2018 A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism, perhaps the most directly relevant work for evaluating Asher's thesis -- from its White Russian origins through its Nazi adoption to its post-war survival. (Michael Kellogg's 2005 The Russian Roots of Nazism: White Émigrés and the Making of National Socialism, 1917-1945 is also useful here in seeing the lineage of the White Russian propaganda tradition into which Mr Asher is tapped.)
And of course Norman Cohn's 1967 Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion remains the foundational study of the conspiracy tradition and is still essential reading.
Instead Mr Asher relies for his work on manufactured quotes and lists, and on figures such as Douglas Reed, E. Michael Jones and Father Denis Fahey.
Even apart from all that, the footnotes desperately need editing, and book titles, page numbers, dates, and publisher's information added. Indeed, in this day and age add the internet sources. And attribute them all. (The Solzhenitsyn quote above is just one unattributed example among many.)
Yes, it's a long review of a short book. But as Brandolini’s Law famously suggests, the time and energy needed to refute nonsense is an order of magnitude larger than that taken to produce it. It also takes longer to point out errors than to simply say “buy this book." Which I cannot do.
In a 1985 review of Solzhenitsyn's novel August 1914 in The New York Times, Jewish American historian Richard Pipes wrote:
Every culture has its own brand of antisemitism. In Solzhenitsyn's case, it's not racial. It has nothing to do with blood. He's certainly not a racist; the question is fundamentally religious and cultural. He bears some resemblance to Fyodor Dostoyevsky, who was a fervent Christian and patriot and a rabid antisemite. Solzhenitsyn is unquestionably in the grip of the Russian extreme right's view of the Revolution, which is that it was the doing of the Jews.
It would be nice if I were able to be as gentle with Mr Asher and his book. But I can't.
Good cover though.
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