What I want to do in this chapter is to examine how prominent was the presence of Jews in the government and security apparatus of the Soviet Union and the Peoples Republic of Poland and how this participation should be evaluated. The position of the Bolsheviks on the “Jewish question” is well known. National issues were seen by them as instrumental. They were to be judged on how they advanced the interest of the world revolution and the Soviet state. Where national groups were supported, this was a tactical alliance, like the alliance with the peasantry. The ultimate goal was the creation of a new socialist man, who would be above petty nationalist divisions, and a single world socialist state. All those responsible for Jewish policy within the Bolshevik Party sought this final goal; the only difference between them was their view on how long Jewish separateness could be tolerated. The aim was assimilation – a new version of Clermont-Tonnerre's view that the Jews were to be given everything as individuals and nothing as a community.

The Jews, according to Bolshevik theory, were not a nation. In the course of the Bolsheviks’ conflict with the Bund, Lenin had asserted that “the idea of a Jewish nation was essentially totally false and reactionary.” This view was confirmed by Stalin's study of the problem, carried out at Lenin's request in 1913. According to this, a nation should have four characteristics: a common territory, a common language, a common economic system, and a common culture. As Stalin himself put it, “The demand of national autonomy for Russian Jews is something of a curiosity – proposing autonomy for a people without a future and whose very existence has still to be proved.”

The long-term fate of the Jews, whom he described as “a fiction bereft of territory,” was clearly to be integrated into the nations among whom they lived, and ultimately, especially during the Stalinist period, into the emerging Soviet nation. The Bolsheviks recognized that the Jews possessed some protonational characteristics and that they were found in considerable numbers in the Soviet Union. In order to facilitate their integration into the new socialist world, for a period a specific socialist Jewish identity, expressed through a secularized version of Yiddish, could be tolerated.