Abraham Cahan Quotes
He considered the Rvolution a victroy for the Jews, which opinion, he said, prevailed on the East Side where rejoicing knew no bounds. We felt, added Mr. Cahan, that this is a great triumph for the Jews' cause. The anti-Jewish element in Russia has always been identified with the anti-revolutionary party. Jews having always sat high in the Councils of the revolutionists, all of our race became inseparably linked with the opponents of the government in the official mind.
"East Side Rejoices at Czar's Downfall." The New York Times, 16 Mar. 1917, p. 4.
She was a brilliant woman who was well ahead of her time in many respects. But her rigid adherence to socialism and communism distorted her view of a number of things. This was one. Pogroms were occasions where the Czarist Russian Cossacks or other gangs of hooligans were “allowed” and often encouraged to attack Jewish farms, villages and stores. They looted the property, raped and murdered many of the people, and often ethnically cleansed areas. Rosa was thrilled by the Russian Revolution and assumed that something as uncivilized as Pogroms and anti-Semitism would never take place in the coming communist society of Russia. As a German Jew, although there was a terrible history from the Dark and Middle Ages of German Pogroms and ant-Semitism, Germany of 1917 was too civilized and modern to ever have attacks on Jews. She completely underestimated what the politicians of Russia and Germany would do to control their societies and pander to some while scapegoating and murdering Jews and other minorities. She herself was murdered by a German fascist anti-Semite 2 years after this statement.
Goldman and other American radicals who had been born in Russia were deported to America after the Palmer Raids. When she arrived, she was shocked that the Russian Revolution had betrayed all the principles of freedom that had been advocated by most of the communist leaders. She left Russia and for the rest of her life condemned the Russian Bolsheviks and the result of the Revolution. She was one of the first radicals who realized that Russia itself had betrayed the principles of the revolution.
This was the basic document issued after the Russian Revolution establishing the basic legal and economic structure of the new Soviet State.
This book—a compendium of 17 lectures—was the basis of the Iranian Revolution and the post revolution government. Note that his views of the vestige of colonialism is classic. He saw the Shah’s regime as a puppet one of the Western powers.
America initially withheld recognition of the 1917 Russian revolutionary government and joined a number of other nations in stationing troops around Russia. The fear of Marxism was the beginning of the Red Scare in America. Ironically, in the early years after the Russian revolution, Russia had a relatively democratic government. The dictatorship of a few at the head of the Communist Party had not yet evolved. Ironically, when we did recognize Russia again it was after it had gone through a short lived democratic period, and was in the hands of a dictatorial few. America and many other nations valued stability and predictability more so than democracy. Hearst was one of the few American notables who saw the hypocrisy of this.
Russia at the time would not allow Jews to leave the country under the theory that The Soviet Union had paid to educate them and their skills were too valuable to allow them to emigrate to other nations without some compensation for Russia. Meanwhile there was immense pent up pressure for Jews to immigrate to the U. S., Israel, Europe, even parts of South America and Asia. Russia finally changed their policies and millions of Jews and non-Jews emigrated.
Although he was a Marxist, he was also a democrat. He was one of the first leftists to criticize the Russian Revolution. The letter was widely published. There were few left wing intellectuals who would take Lenin on at the time but Gorter was one.
It is hard for us today to understand why intelligent, thoughtful, people would seriously consider and even advocate anarchy. Yet there were many intelligent people who preached anarchy. The key to understanding this is that it is also hard for us to realize how terrible and actually dangerous was typical life under the Russian Government of the Czars. It was not only that most people were serfs--virtually slaves, but the government officials, the military and civilian both, could and did, abuse people in every way imaginable. In America today, if any of us were unfortunate to be the victim of violence, the odds are high that it would be at the hands of another citizen. In Russia (and other countries) at the time, the odds were that the perpetrator of the violence was a government official or government sanctioned person—police, military, aristocrats, civil officers. As but one example. Cossacks would frequently get drunk, pillage and rape a community and kill any who resisted—all with impunity. This quotation from Tolstoy is the classic argument of the anarchist at the time. It was impossible that the absence of government could be as bad as the government then was.
Abraham "Abe" Cahan was a Lithuanian-born Jewish American socialist newspaper editor, novelist, and politician. Cahan was one of the founders of The Forward (Yiddish: פֿאָרווערטס, romanized: Forverts, lit. 'Forward!'), an American Yiddish publication, and was its editor-in-chief for 43 years. During his stewardship of the Forward, it became a prominent voice in the Jewish community and in the Socialist Party of America, voicing a relatively moderate stance within the realm of American socialist politics.
