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Международная жизнь
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- about 50 years after the first Zionist congress.
The essense of distortions of history by anti-Russian politicians, public figures and scholars is
that they see the former Soviet Union as an entity that in a way was similar to Nazi Germany
from the viewpoint of home and foreign policy.
We will see the absurdity of such conclusions if we go to real events and facts as recorded in
documents and statements of politicians.
Despite difficulties it came up against, the evacuation policy did save very large numbers of Jew-
ish lives. The greatest problem was evacuation from western regions of the country that bordered
Germany and were the first to be attacked. Due to the successful first few months of the
blitzkrieg, it was only possible to evacuate 12% or just about 200,000 of the two million Jews
who lived in western Belarus, western Ukraine, the Baltic region, and Moldova. At the same time,
more than one million Jews, one third of the Jewish population of the European part of the
Soviet Union, had been taken beyond the Urals from territories that were further away from the
frontlines by the time German forces arrived. In addition, a significant number of Jews - the
exact figure is unknown due to the absence of any reliable statistics - fled without the assistance
of state services responsible for evacuation.
At that time, Soviet leaders, including Joseph Stalin, made very cautious statements about mass
killings of Jews in occupied territories, claiming emphatically that Jews were being subjected to
the same form of persecution as Slavs.
Going back to the Soviet Union's role in creating the State of Israel, it should be pointed out
that, in the late 1940s and in the 1950s, our country followed up its powerful diplomatic support
for the newborn state with political support for it and with major military and economic assis-
tance to it. Due to increasingly intense rivalry between great powers in that part of the world,
the Soviet Union quite often acted via its new Eastern European allies.
The Soviet Union supported Israel throughout the first Arab-Israeli war. Moscow condemned
the actions of the Arab states and qualified Israel's armed action as a legitimate act of self-de-
fense.
It would be important to mention that, besides giving Israel extensive political and military sup-
port, there was significant Soviet influence in the construction of the Jewish state's government
and political systems, in the evolvement of its economic model, and in its cultural development.
Recently, many intellectuals in the West have been saying that humankind is moving closer to a
"Rubicon" - a third world war or the first global great depression. Today there are only a few
countries that can launch a destructive global crisis. They include Israel, which is one of the for-
malized results of the Second World War, and "creeping" revision of the results of that war will
inevitably affect that country. But the future of Israel cannot be understood without analyzing
its history, least of all without analyzing the mutagenesis of the term "Holocaust." The term
"Holocaust" was popularized by writer Elie Wiesel, a Nobel Prize winner, as a symbol of Nazi
gas chambers and crematoriums and a symbol of the natural fight of the Jews for the recognition
of the scale of the tragedy of the Jewish people during the Second World War.