1918 Resolution of the Council of People's Commissars on anti-Semitism

One hundred years ago, on July 25, 1918, the Council of People's Commissars adopted a resolution "On the fight against anti-Semitism and Jewish pogroms." It said:

"According to the information received by the Council of People's Commissars, the counter-revolutionaries in many cities, especially in the front line, are conducting pogromist agitation, the consequence of which in places were excesses against the working Jewish population. The bourgeois counter-revolution is taking into its own hands the weapon that fell from the hands of the tsar ... Now the counter-revolutionaries they resumed the persecution against the Jews, taking advantage of hunger, fatigue, as well as the underdevelopment of the most backward masses and the remnants of hostility towards the Jews, which was instilled in the people by the autocracy.

In the Russian Soviet Federative Republic, where the principle of self-determination of the working masses of all peoples is proclaimed, there is no place for national oppression. The Jewish bourgeois is our enemy not as a Jew, but as a bourgeois. The Jewish worker is our brother. Any persecution of any nation is unacceptable, criminal and shameful. The Council of People's Commissars declares the anti-Semitic movement and the pogroms of Jews to be the death of the cause of the workers' and peasants' revolution and calls on the working people of Socialist Russia to fight this evil by all means.