Burford cites approvingly from the dust-jacket of "The Unknown Lenin" that "in 1919 Lenin issued instructions to the Communist authorities in the Ukraine not to accept Jews in the Soviet government of that republic." This really pisses me off. It gives the impression that there was official anti-Semitism in Lenin's government, whereas in fact the Bolsheviks were uncompromising enemies of anti-Semitism. The reason that Pipes makes such a false allegation is that he has made the case that Hitler studied Lenin's rule in Russia as a model for his own totalitarian state, including the persecution of the Jews. Burford passes this on to us because, for all his Marxish talk about Value, he hates the revolution that for the first time in history abolished the rule of Capital.
For a historically accurate account of what took place in the Ukraine in this period, I recommend John Rees's "In Defense of October":
--- Soon, everywhere that the Whites ruled, dictatorships of a kind only later rivalled by the Nazis held sway. 'The greater the terror, the greater our victories', declared Kornilov. 'We must save Russia', be argued, 'even if we have to set fire to half of it and shed the blood of three fourths of all the Russians!' It was clear to the Bolsheviks what such declarations meant from the time, early in the civil war, when the Whites loaded tiree freight cars with corpses and marked them: 'Fresh meat, destination Petrograd'. When the Whites retook Kiev in August 1919, 'anti-Semitic venom fairly dripped from some of the public pronouncements of Denikin's generals. One of these vowed that 'the diabolical force that lives in the heart of the Jew-Communists will be destroyed'. W Bruce Lincoln, not a pro-Bolshevik historian, writes that Denikin:
"imposed a regime marked by.. .a vicious hatred for all Jews. As the pogroms of 1919 burst upon the Jews of the Ukraine with an incredible ferocity, the enemies of Bolshevism committed some of the most brutal acts of persecution in the modern history of the Western world."
In these pogroms the 'identification of the Jews with the Bolsheviks played a central part:
"No longer spontaneous outpourings of racial and religious hatred, pogroms now became coldly calculated incidents of wholesale rape, extreme brutality and unprecedented destruction. In a single day at the end of August in the Jewish settlement of Kremenchug, the Whites raped 350 women, including pregnant women, women who had just given birth and even women who were dying."
In Kiev, the anti-Semitic Cadet Shulgin remembers, "gigantic five and six storey buildings began to shriek from top to bottom." In the town of Felshin a third of the Jewish population perished. In 1919 alone, just in the Ukraine, the Whites killed 150,000 Jews, a rate only exceeded by the Nazi Holocaust One in 13 of the Jewish population of the Ukraine had been slaughtered.
Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)