1 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 200 Years Together Russo-Jewish History

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and coteries”; “old Zionists with connections to relatives or friends in Israel were active in

those groups.”

In May 1956, a delegation from the French Socialist Party arrived in Moscow. “Particular

attention was paid to the situation of Jews in the Soviet Union.”

Khrushchev found himself

in a hot corner – now he could not afford to ignore the questions, yet he knew, especially

after experiencing postwar Ukraine, that the Jews are not likely to be returned to their [high]

social standing like in 1920s and 1930s. He replied: “In the beginning of the revolution, we

had many Jews in executive bodies of party and government …. After that, we have

developed new cadres …. If Jews wanted to occupy positions of leadership in our republics

today, it would obviously cause discontent among the local people …. If a Jew, appointed to

a high office, surrounds himself with Jewish colleagues, it naturally provokes envy and

hostility toward all Jews.” (The French publication Socialist Herald calls “strange” and “false”

the Khrushchev’s point about “surrounding himself with Jewish colleagues”.) In the same

discussion, when Jewish culture and schools were addressed, Khrushchev explained that “if

Jewish schools were established, there probably would not be many prospective students.

The Jews are scattered all over the country …. If the Jews were required to attend a Jewish

school, it certainly would cause outrage. It would be understood as a kind of a ghetto.”

Three months later, in August 1956, a delegation of the Canadian Communist Party visited

the USSR – and it stated outright that it had “a special mission to achieve clarity on the

Jewish question”. Thus, in the postwar years, the Jewish question was becoming a central

concern of the western communists. “Khrushchev rejected all accusations of anti-Semitism

as a slander against him and the party.” He named a number of Soviet Jews to important

posts, “he even mentioned his Jewish daughter-in-law,” but then he “quite suddenly …

switched to the issue of “good and bad features of each nation” and pointed out “several

negative features of Jews”, among which he mentioned “their political unreliability.” Yet he

neither mentioned any of their positive traits, nor did he talk about other nations.

In the same conversation, Khrushchev expressed his agreement with Stalin’s decision against

establishing a Crimean Jewish Republic, stating that such [Jewish] colonization of the Crimea

would be a strategic military risk for the Soviet Union. This statement was particularly hurtful

to the Jewish community. The Canadian delegation insisted on publication of a specific

statement by the Central Committee of Communist Party of the Soviet Union about the

sufferings of Jews, “but it was met with firm refusal” as “other nations and republics, which

also suffered from Beria’s crimes against their culture and intelligentsia, would ask with

astonishment why this statement covers only Jews?” (S. Schwartz dismissively comments:

“The pettiness of this argumentation is striking.”

)

Yet it did not end at that. “Secretly, influential foreign Jewish communists tried” to obtain

“explanations about the fate of the Jewish cultural elite”, and in October of the same year,

twenty-six Western “progressive Jewish leaders and writers” appealed publicly to Prime-

Minister Bulganin and “President” Voroshilov, asking them to issue “a public statement

about injustices committed [against Jews] and the measures the goverment had designed to

restore the Jewish cultural institutions.”

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Yet during both the “interregnum” of 1953-1957 and then in Khrushchev’s period, the Soviet

policies toward Jews were inconsistent, wary, circumspect and ambivalent, thus sending

signals in all directions.

In particular, the summer of 1956, which was filled with all kinds of social expectations in

general, had also became the apogee of Jewish hopes. One Surkov, the head of the Union of

Writers, in a conversation with a communist publisher from New York City mentioned plans

to establish a new Jewish publishing house, theater, newspaper and quarterly literary

magazine; there were also plans to organize a countrywide conference of Jewish writers and

cultural celebrities. It also noted that a commission for reviving the Jewish literature in

Yiddish had been already established. In 1956, “many Jewish writers and journalists gathered

in Moscow again.”

The Jewish activists later recalled that “the optimism inspired in all of us

by the events of 1956 did not quickly fade away.”

Yet the Soviet government continued with its meaningless and aimless policies, discouraging

any development of an independent Jewish culture. It is likely that Khrushchev himself was

strongly opposed to it.

And then came new developments - the Suez Crisis, where Israel, Britain and France allied in

attacking Egypt (“Israel is heading to suicide,” formidably warned the Soviet press), and the

Hungarian Uprising, with its anti-Jewish streak, nearly completely concealed by history,

(resulting, perhaps, from the overrepresentation of Jews in the Hungarian KGB). (Could this

be also one of the reasons, even if a minor one, for the complete absence of Western

support for the rebellion? Of course, at this time the West was preoccupied with the

Suez Crisis. And yet wasn’t it a signal to the Soviets suggesting that it would be better if the

Jewish theme be kept hushed?)

Then, a year later, Khrushchev finally overpowered his highly placed enemies within the

party and, among others, Kaganovitch was cast down.

Could it really be such a big deal? The latter was not the only one ousted and even then, he

was not the principal figure among the dethroned; and he was definitely not thrown out

because of his Jewishness. Yet “from the Jewish point of view, his departure symbolized the

end of an era”. Some looked around and counted – “the Jews disappeared not only from the

ruling sections of the party, but also from the leading governmental circles.”

It was time to pause and ponder thoroughly – what did the Jews really think about such new

authorities?

David Burg, who emigrated from the USSR in 1956, came upon a formula on how the Jews

should treat the Soviet rule. (It proved quite useful for the authorities): “To some, the

danger of anti-Semitism `from below´ seems greater than the danger of anti-Semitism `from

above´”; “though the government oppresses us, it nevertherless allows us to exist. If,

however, a revolutionary change comes, then during the inevitable anarchy of the transition

period we will simply be exterminated. Therefore, let’s hold on to the government no matter

how bad it is.”

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We repeatedly encountered similar concerns in the 1930s - that the Jews should support the

Bolshevik power in the USSR because without it their fate would be even worse. And now,

even though the Soviet power had further deteriorated, the Jews had no other choice but

hold on to it as before.

The Western world and particularly the United States always heeded such recommendations,

even during the most strained years of the Cold War. In addition, socialist Israel was still full

of communist sympathizers and could forgive the Soviet Union a lot for its role in the defeat

of Hitler. Yet how then could Soviet anti-Semitism be interpreted? In this aspect, the

recommendation of D. Burg stood up to the acute “social demand” – to move emphasis from

the anti-Semitism of the Soviet government to the “anti-Semitism of the Russian people” –

that ever-present curse.

So now some Jews have even fondly recalled the long-disbanded YevSek [the "Jewish

Section" of the Central Committee, dismantled in 1930 when Dimanshtein and its other

leaders were shot]. Even though back in the 1920s it seemed overly pro-Communist, the

YevSek was “to certain extent a guardian of Jewish national interes ts … an organ that

produced some positive work as well.”

In the meantime, Khrushchev’s policy remained equivocal; it is reasonable to assume that

though Khrushchev himself did not like Jews, he did not want to fight against them, realizing

the international political counter-productivity of such an effort. In 1957-1958, Jewish

musical performances and public literary clubs were authorized and appeared in many cities

countrywide. (For example, “in 1961, Jewish literary soirees and Jewish song performances

were attended by about 300,000 people.”

) Yet at the same time, the circulation of

Warsaw’s Volksstimme was discontinued in the Soviet Union, thus cutting the Soviet Jews off

from an outside source of Jewish information.

In 1954, after a long break, Sholom

Aleichem’s The Adventures of Mottel was again published in Russian, followed by several

editions of his other books and their translations into other languages; in 1959 a large

edition of his collected works was produced as well. In 1961 in Moscow, the Yiddish

magazine Sovetish Heymland was established (though it strictly followed the official policy

line). Publications of books by Jewish authors, who were executed in Stalin’s times, were

resumed in Yiddish and Russian, and one even could hear Jewish tunes on the broadcasts of

the All-Soviet Union radio.

By 1966, “about one hundred Jewish authors were writing in

Yiddish in the Soviet Union,” and “almost all of the named authors simultaneously worked as

Russian language journalists and translators,” and “many of them worked as teachers in the

Russian schools.”

However, the Jewish theater did not re-open until 1966. In 1966, S.

Schwartz defined the Jewish situation *in the USSR+ as “cultural orphanhood.”

Yet another

author bitterly remarks: “The general lack of enthusiasm and interest … from the wider

Jewish population … toward those cultural undertakings … cannot be explained solely by

official policies ….” “With rare exceptions, during those years the Jewish actors performed in

half-empty halls. Books of Jewish writers were not selling well.”

Similarly ambivalent, but more hostile policies of the Soviet authorities in Khrushchev’s

period were implemented against the Jewish religion. It was a part of Khrushchev’s general

anti-religious assault; it is well known how devastating it was for the Russian Orthodox

Church. Since the 1930s, not a single theological school functioned in the USSR. In 1957 a

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yeshiva – a school for training rabbis – opened in Moscow. It accommodated only 35

students, and even those were being consistently pushed out under various pretexts such as

withdrawal of residence registration in Moscow. Printing of prayer books and manufacturing

of religious accessories was hindered. Up to 1956, before the Jewish Passover matzah was

baked by state-owned bakeries and then sold in stores. Beginning in 1957, however, baking

of matzah was obstructed and since 1961 it was banned outright almost everywhere. One

day, the authorities would not interfere with receiving parcels with matzah from abroad,

another day, they stopped the parcels at the customs, and even demanded recipients to

express in the press their outrage against the senders.

In many places, synagogues were

closed down. “In 1966, only 62 synagogues were functioning in the entire Soviet Union.”

Yet the authorities did not dare to shut down the synagogues in Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev

and in the capitals of the republics. In the 1960s, there used to be extensive worship services

on holidays with large crowds of 10,000 to 15,000 on the streets around synagogues.

Schwartz notes that in the 1960s Jewish religious life was in severe decline, yet he large-

mindedly reminds us that it was the result of the long process of secularization that began in

Russian Jewry in the late 19

Century. (The process, which, he adds, has also succeeded in

extremely non-communist Poland between the First and Second World Wars.

) Judaism in

the Soviet Union lacked a united control center; yet when the Soviet authorities wanted to

squeeze out a political show from the leading rabbis for foreign policy purposes, be it about

the well-being of Judaism in the USSR or outrage against the nuclear war, the government

was perfectly able to stage it.

“The Soviet authorities had repeatedly used Jewish religious

leaders for foreign policy goals.” For example, “in November 1956 a group of rabbis issued a

protest against” the actions of Israel during the Suez War.

Another factor, which aggravated the status of Judaism in the USSR after the Suez War, was

the growing fashionability of what was termed the “struggle against Zionism.” Zionism, being,

strictly speaking, a form of socialism, should naturally had been seen as a true brother to the

party of Marx and Lenin. Yet after the mid-1950s, the decision to secure the friendship of the

Arabs drove the Soviet leaders toward persecution of Zionism. However, for the Soviet

masses Zionism was a distant, unfamiliar and abstract phenomenon. Therefore, to flesh out

this struggle, to give it a distinct embodiment, the Soviet government presented Zionism as a

caricature composed of the characteristic and eternal Jewish images. The books and

pamphlets allegedly aimed against Zionism also contained explicit anti-Judaic and anti-

Jewish messages. If in the Soviet Union of 1920-1930s Judaism was not as brutally

persecuted as the Russian Orthodox Christianity, then in 1957 a foreign socialist

commentator noted how that year signified “a decisive intensification of the struggle against

Judaism,” the “turning point in the struggle against the Jewish religion,” and that “the

character of struggle betrays that it is directed not only against Judaism, but against the Jews

in general.”

There was one stirring episode: in 1963 in Kiev, the Ukrainian Academy of

Sciences published 12,000 copies of a brochure Unadorned Judaism in Ukrainian, yet it was

filled with such blatant anti-Jewish caricatures that it provoked a large-scale international

outcry, joined even by the communist “friends” (who were financially supported by Moscow),

such as the leaders of the American and British communist parties, newspapers L’Humanite,

L’Unita, as well as a pro-Chinese communist newspaper from Brussels, and many others. The

UN Human Rights Commission demanded an explanation from its Ukrainian representative.

The World Jewish Cultural Association called for the prosecution of the author and the

cartoonist. The Soviet side held on for awhile, insisting that except for the drawings, “the

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book deserves a generally positive assessment.”

Finally, even Pravda had to admit that it

was indeed “an ill-prepared … brochure” with “erroneous statements … and illustrations that

may offend feelings of religious people or be interpreted as anti-Semitic,” a phenomenon

that, “as is universally known, does not and cannot exist in our country.”

Yet at the same

time Izvestia stated that although there were certain drawbacks to the brochure, “its main

idea … is no doubt right.”

There were even several arrests of religious Jews from Moscow and Leningrad – accused of

“espionage [conversations during personal meetings in synagogues] for a capitalistic state

*Israel+” with synagogues allegedly used as “fronts for various criminal activities”

– to scare

others more effectively.

***

Although there were already no longer any Jews in the most prominent positions, many still

occupied influential and important second-tier posts (though there were exceptions: for

example, Veniamin Dymshits smoothly ran Gosplan (the State Planning Committee) from

1962, while being at the same time the Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers of USSR

and a member of Central Committee from 1961 to 1986

). Why, at one time the Jews were

joining “NKVD and the MVD … in such numbers that even now, after all purges of the very

Jewish spirit, a few individuals miraculously remained, such as the famous Captain Joffe in a

camp in Mordovia.”

According to the USSR Census of 1959, 2,268,000 Jews lived in the Soviet Union. (Yet there

were caveats regarding this figure: “Everybody knows … that there are more Jews in the

Soviet Union than the Census showed,” as on the Census day, a Jew states his nationality not

according to his passport, but any nationality he wishes.

) Of those, 2,162,000 Jews lived in

the cities, i.e., 95,3% of total population – much more than 82% in 1926 or 87% in 1939.

And if we glance forward into the 1970 Census, the observed “increase in the number of

Jews in Moscow and Leningrad is apparently caused not by natural growth but by migration

from other cities (in spite of all the residential restrictions).” Over these 11 years, “at least

several thousand Jews relocated to Kiev. The concentration of Jews in the large cities had

been increasing for many decades.”

These figures are very telling for those who know about the differences in living standards

between the urban and the rural populations in the Soviet Union. G. Rosenblum, the editor

of the prominent Israeli newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth, recalls an almost anecdotal story by

Israeli Ambassador to Moscow Dr. Harel about his tour of the USSR in the mid-1960s. In a

large kolkhoz near Kishinev he was told that “the Jews who work here want to meet *him+.

*The Israeli+ was very happy that there were Jews in the kolkhoz” (love of agriculture - a

good sign for Israel). He recounts: “Three Jews came to meet me … one was a cashier,

another – editor of the kolkhoz’s wall newspaper and the third one was a kind of economic

manager. I couldn’t find any other. So, what the Jews used to do *i.e. before+, they are still

doing.” G. Rosenblum confirms this: “Indeed, the Soviet Jews in their masses did not take to

the physical work.”

L. Shapiro concludes, “Conversion of Jews to agriculture ended in

failure despite all the efforts … of public Jewish organizations and … the assistance of the

state.”

357

In Moscow, Leningrad and Kiev – the cities enjoying the highest living and cultural standards

in the country, the Jews, according to the 1959 Census, constituted 3.9%, 5.8%, and 13.9 %

of the population, respectively, which is quite a lot, considering that they accounted only for

1.1% of the entire population of the USSR.

So it was that this extremely high concentration of Jews in urban areas – 95% of all Soviet

Jews lived in the cities – that made “the system of prohibitions and restrictions” particularly

painful for them. (As we mentioned in the previous chapter, this system was outlined back in

the early 1940s.) And “although the restrictive rules have never been officially acknowledged

and officials stoutly denied their existence, these rules and restrictions very effectively

barred the Jews from many spheres of action, professions and positions.”

Some recall a disturbing rumor circulating then among the Jews: allegedly, Khrushchev said

in one of his unpublished speeches that “as many Jews will be accepted into the institutions

of higher education as work in the coal mines.”

Perhaps, he really just blurted it out in his

usual manner, because such “balancing” was never carried out. Yet by the beginning of

1960s, while the absolute number of Jewish students increased, their relative share

decreased substantially when compared to the pre-war period: if in 1936 the share of Jews

among students was 7.5 times higher than that in the total population

, then by 1960s it

was only 2.7 times higher. These new data on the distribution of students in higher and

secondary education by nationality were published for the first time (in the post-war period)

in 1963 in the statistical annual report, The National Economy of the USSR,

and a similar

table was annually produced up to 1972. In terms of the absolute number of students in

institutions of higher education and technical schools in the 1962-1963 academic year, Jews

were fourth after the three Slavic nations (Russians, Ukrainians, Byelorussians), with 79,300

Jewish students in institutions of higher education out of a total 2,943,700 students (2.69%).

In the next academic year 1963-1964, the number of Jewish students increased to 82,600,

while the total number of students in the USSR reached 3,260,700 (2.53%). This share

remained almost constant until the 1969-1970 academic year; 101,000 Jewish students out

of total 4,549,900. Then the Jewish share began to decline and in 1972-1973 it was 1.91%:

88,500 Jewish students out of total 4,630,246. (This decline coincided with the beginning of

the Jewish immigration to Israel.)

The relative number of Jewish scientists also declined in 1960s, from 9.5% in 1960 to 6.1% in

1973.

During those same years, “there were tens of thousands Jewish names in the Soviet

art and literature,”

including 8.5% of writers and journalists, 7.7% of actors and artists,

more than 10% of judges and attorneys, and about 15% doctors.

Traditionally, there were

always many Jews in medicine, yet consider the accursed “Soviet psychiatry,” which in those

years began locking up healthy people in mental institutions. And who were those

psychiatrists? Listing the “Jewish occupations,” M.I. Heifets writes: “`Psychiatry is a Jewish

monopoly,´ a friend, a Jewish psychiatrist, told me, just before *my+ arrest; `we began to get

Russians only recently and even then as the result of an order´” *translator's note: admission

into medical residency training was regulated at local and central levels; here author

indicates that admission of ethnically Russian doctors into advanced psychiatry training was

mandated from the higher levels]. He provides examples: the Head Psychiatrist of Leningrad,

Professor Averbukh, provides his expertise for the KGB in the “Big House”; in Moscow there

was famous Luntz; in the Kaluga Hospital there was Lifshitz and “his Jewish gang.” When

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