History of the Jews in Russia and the Soviet Union: Encyclopedia II - History of the Jews in Russia and the Soviet Union - Assimilation trends

History of the Jews in Russia and the Soviet Union - Assimilation trends

In the Tsarist Russia, assimilation, russification and conversion to the state religion of Orthodox Christianity were official policies. After coming to power and dealing severe blows to all religions, the Bolsheviks undertook efforts to form a new nation of the Soviet people (Советский народ).

The Russian Empire and later the Soviet Union, one of the world's most ethnically diverse nations, with hundreds of distinct nationalities, was also home to a Jewish population of about two million before its disintegration in 1991, making Jews the eleventh largest Soviet nationality (the USSR classified Jews as a nationality). Despite such diversity, Jews were a unique minority in the ideological state. Before and after the Bolshevik Revolution many of the Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Baltic Jews embraced secular education and culture, thereby becoming a minority that had adapted the Russian language and culture.

Jews, in that sense, were not "foreigners" within Soviet Russia, like Tatars or indigenous Siberians, but instead a distinct, cohesive group bounded by a common value system, Yiddish language, exclusive cultural institutions, synagogues, and Zionist nationalism, despite the absence of a territorial unit or a single locale. This existence is thus alien to Marxism-Leninism as espoused by the Soviet state, which viewed Jewish cohesiveness as resulting from class struggle, binding proletariat Jews to Jews in oppressor classes. Marxist egalitarianism and universality suggested that it would be ideal to see the assimilation of Jews and the renunciation of Judaism, in a sense contradicting the elements that allowed Jews to be distinct members of society. All Soviet ethnic groups, such as Russians, Ukrainians, Uzbeks, Tatars, were encouraged to look at class over nationality, but did not face assimilation and cultural annihilation because of their individual locales and common languages. While Jews had been bound together in the past by Yiddish, most by the end of the Stalinist era had already adapted the Russian language and culture, and tended to live alongside Slavic gentiles.

Certain Marxists predicted such a sociological trend, but miscalculated the extent to which this trend would erode the coheisiveness of the Jewish community. Karl Marx and some later Marxists assumed that the Jewish identity would cease to exist after the demise of capitalism since man can only be free when he transcended the confines of individuality and locality and recognized a shared humanity, "a universal existence", free of antagonism and divisiveness, which only exist due to class struggle. Although the Jewish community went from being one of the most isolated in Europe to one of the most assimilated in Europe from the time of the Bolshevik Revolution to the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union, the identity has not faded away by any means.

Law throughout Soviet history, however, listed Jews as one of the Union's "basic nations", with their own language (Yiddish), and their own autonomous region — a failed, inhospitable settlement in the Russian Far East that was nonetheless symbolic. The word "Еврей" (Yevrei, "Jew") was also listed in the "национальность" ("nationality") section (the infamous "Пятая графа" (pyataya grafa, "the fifth record") of the obligatory internal passport document, which stated the ethnic or national background of all Soviet citizens. Such treatment of Jews as a nationality is somewhat alien to Jewish law, but reminiscent of Zionism. In May 1976, the Soviet journal Party Life prominently displayed Jews as a distinct "nationality."

While Soviet socialism clearly did not destroy the Jewish identity, it nevertheless weakened a degree of cultural cohesiveness. Hebrew and Yiddish languages, Jewish theaters, Jewish schools, religion and Zionism bounded the Soviet Jewish population together despite the absence of a common locale; but these were the very elements restricted by a Soviet Union promoting secularism among all its citizens. The closings of synagogues and other important Jewish cultural institutions, such as theaters, schools and periodicals, were conducted under this ideological context of egalitarianism. While threatening to Judaism and the Jewish culture, the regime enforced the same policies on other religions, leading to the development of a modern, secular state. However, after the end of the Second World War, the restrictions against Christians and Muslims were gradually reduced, while the persecution of Judaism remained in force. The rise of Jewish secularism thus paralleled social trends among Soviet gentiles, but had threatening overtones to Jewish existence. Soviet secularism, the discouragement of Yiddish, and the restriction of other elements that forged an exclusive, Jewish identity, caused assimilation to be a foreboding threat to Jewish existence. Soviet rule can be characterized by a rise in intermarriages and abandonment of Jewish identities by those who were eager to prove their loyalty to the Communist Party's atheism and proletarian internationalism, and committed to stamp out any sign of "Jewish cultural particularism", such as Leon Trotsky, Maxim Litvinov or Lazar Kaganovich.

Assimilated Jews significantly contributed to Russian and Soviet multi-ethnic culture, science and technology. It is hard to imagine Russian art without Isaac Levitan and Léon Bakst; Russian literature—Isaac Babel, Osip Mandelstam and Boris Pasternak; Russian ballet—Ida Rubinstein and Maya Plisetskaya; Soviet cinematography—Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov; Russian and Soviet music—Anton Rubinstein and Isaak Dunayevsky; comedy—Faina Ranevskaya, Arkady Raikin and Mikhail Zhvanetsky; science—Lev Landau, Abram Ioffe and Yakov Zel'dovich; defense industry—Boris Vannikov, Mikhail Gurevich (of MiG) and Semyon Lavochkin.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Assimilation trends", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki