History of the Jews in Russia and the Soviet Union: Encyclopedia II - History of the Jews in Russia and the Soviet Union - After the October Revolution 1917-1991

History of the Jews in Russia and the Soviet Union - After the October Revolution 1917-1991

History of the Jews in Russia and the Soviet Union - Under Lenin 1917-1924

In March 1919, Lenin delivered a speech "On Anti-Jewish Pogroms"^[6] on a gramophone disc. Lenin sought to explain the phenomenon of anti-Semitism in Marxist terms. According to Lenin, anti-Semitism was an "attempt to divert the hatred of the workers and peasants from the exploiters toward the Jews." Linking anti-Semitism to class struggle, he argued that it was merely a political technique used by the tsar to exploit religious fanaticism, popularize the despotic, unpopular regime, and divert popular anger toward a scapegoat. The Soviet Union also officially maintained this Marxist-Leninist interpretation under Stalin, who expounded Lenin's critique of anti-Semitism. However, this did not prevent the widely publicized repressions of Jewish intellectuals during 1948–1953 (see After World War II).

Such actions, along with extensive Jewish participation among the Bolsheviks, plagued the Communists during the Russian Civil War against the Whites with a reputation of being "a gang of marauding Jews"; Jews were a plurality ethnicity in the Communist Central Committee, outnumbering even ethnic Russians. At the same time, the vast majority of Russia's Jews weren't in any political party.

Lenin initiated repressions against the Jewish Labor Bund in order to consolidate Bolshevik influence over all other left-wing and labor movements. The attempts of the Bund to be the sole representative of the Jewish worker conflicted with Lenin's universal coalition of workers of all nationalities. The outcome, however, was less detrimental than repression of Zionism since most Bund members readily joined the Bolsheviks, and later merged with the Communist Party. The movement did split in three; the Bundist identity survived in interwar Poland under Rafael Abramovich, while more westernized Jews joined the Mensheviks. The prohibition of the Bund was the first example of the drawbacks of Communist anti-nationalism, depriving Jews of a powerful, autonomous interest and paramilitary group.

In 1921, a large number of Jews opted for Poland, as they were entitled by peace treaty in Riga to choose the country they preferred. Several hundred thousand, despite the prospect of Communist paradise and the popular vision of Soviet Russia as ruled by Jews, joined the already numerous Jewish population of Poland.

History of the Jews in Russia and the Soviet Union - Under Stalin 1922-1953

To offset Jewish national and religious aspirations, an alternative to the Land of Israel was established with the help of Komzet in 1928. The Jewish Autonomous Oblast with the center in Birobidzhan in the Russian Far East was to become a "Soviet Zion". Yiddish, rather than "reactionary" Hebrew, would be the national language, and proletarian socialist literature and arts would replace Judaism as the quintessence of culture. Despite a massive domestic and international state propaganda campaign, the Jewish population there never reached 30% (as of 2003 it was only about 1.2%). The experiment ground to a halt in the mid-1930s, during Stalin's first campaign of purges. Jewish leaders were arrested and executed, and Yiddish schools were shut down.

Stalin's letter "Anti-Semitism: Reply to an Inquiry of the Jewish News Agency in the United States" dated January 12, 1931 indicated his official position:

In 1936 Pravda, the party's newspaper and main propaganda organ, printed a beneficial explanation of the vile nature of anti-Semitism. It stated that "national and racial chauvinism is a survival of the barbarous practices of the cannibalistic period... it served the exploiters... to protect capitalism from the attack of the working class; anti-Semitism, a phenomenon profoundly hostile to the Soviet Union, is repressed in the USSR."

Despite the official Soviet opposition to anti-Semitism, critics of the ensuing USSR characterize it as an anti-Semitic regime, pointing out the Non-Aggression Pact with Nazi Germany, the relatively high Jewish casualties in the Great Purges, and Soviet hostility toward Jewish religious and cultural institutions (a hostility, however, that was applied with practically equal force against all religious and non-communist cultural institutions, the notable exception being the Christian Orthodox Church during World War II, or the "Great Patriotic War" as it was known there). They also cite Soviet anti-Zionism. Although the Soviet Union voted in favor of the Partition Plan of Resolution 181, which opened the way for the creation of the state of Israel, in the United Nations 1947 vote, and also recognized Israel immediately after the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel was unilaterally proclaimed, Soviet support for Israel was short-lived. Soviet authorities refused to grant emigration visas for Israel to Soviet Jews, and the USSR took a generally consistent pro-Arab stance in the Israeli-Arab conflict.

The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact—the 1939 non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany—created further suspicion regarding the Soviet Union's position toward Jews. The pact, arguably allowed Hitler to freely enter Poland, the nation with the world's largest Jewish population, but it was neither an acceptance of Nazism nor instigated by anti-Jewish objectives. It was a pragmatic foreign policy agreement that tried and failed to head off conflict with a powerful and hostile Germany, one of a series of treaties by which various European powers tried and failed to avoid war with Hitler. With Western backing of the White Russian army in the Russian Civil War a recent memory, and with the failure of Popular Front politics, Stalin appears to have despaired of an alliance with the Western democracies against the Nazis. Believing the USSR to be incapable of resisting the Nazis militarily, he sought a deal. This was certainly a disaster for Eastern Europe's Jews, but that was a side effect rather than a motivation.

The Great Purges are popularly portrayed as anti-Semitic in the West, thereby ignoring the actual context of Stalin's consolidation of power. A number of the most prominent victims of the Purges—Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev, to name a few—were ethnic Jews. That is, however, an oversimplification, since Stalin was just as brutal when acting against his real or imagined enemies who were not Jewish—e.g., Bukharin, Tukhachevsky, Kirov, and Ordzhonikidze. The number of prominent Jewish Old Bolsheviks killed in the purge reflects the fact that Jews were the largest group in the Central Committee, which had a non-Russian majority, and that Jews had a high participation among the Bolsheviks.

In addition, some Stalinists survived notwithstanding their Jewish heritage. Stalin did not purge Lazar Kaganovich, a loyal supporter who came to Stalin's attention in the 1920s as a successful bureaucrat in Tashkent, who aided Stalin and Molotov against Kirov and who participated in his brutal elimination of rivals in the 1930s. Kaganovich's loyalty endured after Stalin's death, when his opposition to de-Stalinization caused him to be expelled from the party in 1957, along with Molotov.

Beyond longstanding controversies, ranging from the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact to anti-Zionism, the Soviet Union did grant official "equality of all citizens regardless of status, sex, race, religion, and nationality." The years before the Holocaust were an era of rapid change for Soviet Jews, leaving behind the dreadful poverty of the Pale of Settlement. Forty percent of the population in the former Pale left for large cities within the USSR.

Emphasis on education and movement from countryside shtetls to newly industrialized cities allowed many Soviet Jews to enjoy overall advances under Stalin and to become one of the most educated population groups in the world.

Due to Stalinist emphasis on its urban population, interwar migration inadvertently rescued countless Soviet Jews; Nazi Germany penetrated the entire former Jewish Pale—but were kilometers short of Leningrad and Moscow. The great wave of deportations from the areas annexed by Soviet Union according to the Nazi-Soviet pact, often seen by victims as genocide, paradoxically also saved lives of a few hundred thousand Jewish deportees. However horrible their conditions, the fate of Jews in Nazi Germany was much worse. The migration of many Jews deeper East from the part of the Jewish Pale that would become occupied by Germany saved at least forty percent of this area's Jewish population.

Over two million Soviet Jews died during the Holocaust, second only to the number of Polish Jews who fell victim to Hitler. Even before the mass deportations to the death camps in 1942, German death squads, the Einsatzkommandos, shot hundreds of thousands of Jews throughout 1941. Among some of the larger massacres in 1941 were: 33,771 Jews of Kiev shot in ditches at Babi Yar; 100,000 Jews of Vilna killed in the forests of Ponary, 36,000 Jews machine-gunned in Odessa, 25,000 Jews of Riga killed in the woods at Rumbula, and 10,000 Jews slaughtered in Simferopol in the Crimea. Though mass shootings continued through 1942, most notably 16,000 Jews shot at Pinsk, Jews were increasingly shipped to concentration camps in Poland.

Local residents of German-occupied areas, especially Ukrainians, Lithuanians, and Latvians, often played key roles in the Holocaust. Ukrainian and Latvian police carried out deportations in the Warsaw Ghetto, and Lithuanian police marched Jews to their death at Ponary. Even as some assisted the Germans, many individuals in the territories under German control also helped Jews escape death, see Righteous Among the Nations.

Over 200,000 Jews were also killed in battle fighting in the Red Army against the Nazis.

The typical Soviet policy regarding the Holocaust was to present it as atrocities against Soviet citizens, not acknowledging the genocide of the Jews. For example, after the liberation of Kiev from the Nazi occupation in 1943, the Extraordinary State Commission (Чрезвычайная Государственная Комиссия) was set out to investigate Nazi crimes and its first report was ready by December 25, 1943. It contained (a preserved copy exists) the following sentence:

The officially censored version of the text was:

See also Vasily Grossman, Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, Black Book

In January 1948 Solomon Mikhoels, a popular actor-director of the Moscow State Jewish Theater and the chairman of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, was killed in a suspicious car accident.^[9] Mass arrests of prominent Jewish intellectuals and suppression of Jewish culture followed under the banners of campaign against "rootless cosmopolitans" and anti-Zionism. At least thirteen prominent Yiddish writers were executed on August 12, 1952, among them Peretz Markish, Leib Kwitko, David Hoffstein, Itzik Feffer, David Bergelson, Der Nister in the event known as The "Night of Murdered Poets". In the 1955 UN Assembly's session a high Soviet official still denied the "rumors" about their disappearance.

The so-called Doctors' plot of 1953 was a deliberately anti-Semitic policy: Stalin targeted "corrupt Jewish bourgeois nationalists," eschewing the usual code words like "cosmopolitans." Stalin died, however, before this next wave of arrests and executions could be launched in earnest. A number of historians claim that the Doctors' plot was intended as the opening of a campaign that would have resulted in the mass deportation of Soviet Jews had Stalin not died on March 5, 1953. Days after Stalin's death the plot was declared a hoax by the Soviet government.

These cases may have reflected Stalin's paranoia, rather than state ideology — a distinction that made no practical difference as long as Stalin was alive, but which became salient on his death.

History of the Jews in Russia and the Soviet Union - After Stalin

In April 1956, the Warsaw Yiddish language Jewish newspaper Folkshtimme published sensational long lists of Soviet Jews who had perished before and after the Holocaust. The world press began demanding answers from Soviet leaders, as well as inquire about current condition of Jewish education system and culture. The same fall, a group of leading Jewish world figures publicly requested the heads of Soviet state to clarify the situation. Since no cohesive answer was received, their concern was only heightened. The fate of Soviet Jews emerged as a major human rights issue in the West.

History of the Jews in Russia and the Soviet Union - The Soviet Union and Zionism

Marxist anti-nationalism and anti-clericalism had a mixed effect on Soviet Jews. Jews were the immediate benefactors, but long-term victims, of the Marxist notion that any manifestation of nationalism is "socially retrogressive." On one hand, Jews were liberated from the religious persecution of the Tsarist years of "autocracy, nationalism, and Orthodoxy." On the other, this notion was threatening to Jewish cultural institutions, the Bund, Jewish autonomy, Judaism and Zionism.

Political Zionism was officially stamped out for the entire history of the Soviet Union as a form of bourgeois nationalism. Although Leninism emphasizes "self-determination," this did not make the state more accepting of Zionism. Leninism defines self-determination by territory, not culture, which allowed Soviet minorities to have separate oblasts, autonomous regions, or republics, which were nonetheless symbolic until its later years. Jews, however, did not fit such a theoretical model; Jews in the Diaspora did not even have an agricultural base, as Stalin often asserted when attempting to deny the existence of a Jewish nation, and certainly no territorial unit. Marxian notions even denied a Jewish identity beyond religion and caste; Marx defined Jews as a "chimerical nation."

Lenin, claiming to be deeply committed to egalitarian ideals and universality of all humanity, rejected Zionism as a reactionary movement, "bourgeois nationalism", "socially retrogressive", and a backward force that deprecates class divisions among Jews.

Moreover, Zionism entailed contact between Soviet citizens and westerners, which was dangerous in a closed society. Soviet authorities were likewise fearful of any mass-movement independent of monopolistic Communist Party, and not tied to the state or the ideology of Marxism-Leninism.

Without changing its official anti-Zionist stance, from late 1944 until 1948 Stalin had adopted a de facto pro-Zionist foreign policy, apparently believing that the new country would be socialist and would speed the decline of British influence in the Middle East.^[10]

The USSR briefly supported the establishment of Israel. During the 1947 UN Partition Plan debate on May 14, 1947, the Soviet ambassador Andrei Gromyko announced:

This speech was not published in the Soviet media, tightly controlled by the state.

Soviet approval in the United Nations Security Council was critical to the UN partitioning of the British Mandate of Palestine, which led to the founding of the State of Israel. Three days after Israel declared independence, the Soviet Union legally recognized it de jure.

By the end of 1948 the USSR switched sides in the Arab-Israeli conflict and throughout the course of the Cold War unequivocally supported various Arab regimes against Israel. The official position of the Soviet Union and its satellite states and agencies was that Zionism was a tool used by the Jews and Americans for "racist imperialism".

As Israel was emerging as a close Western ally, the specter of Zionism raised fears of internal dissent and opposition. During the later parts of the Cold War Soviet Jews were persecuted as possible traitors, Western sympathisers, or a security liability. The Communist leadership closed down various Jewish organizations and declared Zionism an ideological enemy. The only exception were a few token synagogues. These synagogues were then placed under police surveillance, both openly and through the use of informers.

As a result of the persecution, both state-sponsored and unofficial anti-Semitism became deeply ingrained in the society and remained a fact for years: ordinary Soviet Jews often suffered hardships, epitomized by often not being allowed to enlist in universities or hired to work in certain professions. Many were barred from participation in the government, and had to bear being openly humiliated. Soviet media usually avoided using the word "Jew," and many felt compelled to hide their identities by changing their names.

See also rootless cosmopolitan, Doctors' plot, Zionology and Anti-Zionist committee of the Soviet public

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "After the October Revolution 1917-1991", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki