History Lessons Book Digest: Soviet Antisemitism

June 29, 2017

In its latest review of books from the Memorial library, History Lessons turns to Soviet antisemitism. Regular contributors Sergei Bondarenko and Ivan Shemanov discuss five books about the history of state-sponsored and everyday discrimination against Jews in the USSR.

State Antisemitism in the USSR from Its Beginning to Its Culmination, 1938–1953: A Collection of Documents. Moscow, 2005

The collection covers fifteen years in the development of Soviet state antisemitism, from its first major surge—connected, among other things, with the large-scale purges of the Great Terror and the rise of a “new generation of young administrators”—through the Doctors’ Plot and the campaign’s suspension shortly after Stalin’s death.

The period can be divided into several stages: the prewar years, wartime, the “struggle against cosmopolitanism,” and the large antisemitic campaign of the early 1950s. Each had its own internal logic. What in the 1930s could be interpreted as a surge of everyday antisemitism, and later as an expression of Stalin’s personal prejudices or those of the top leadership, had by the mid-to-late 1940s grown into something larger. As characters in Grossman’s Life and Fate ask, could this have become a kind of disease transmitted to the Soviet Union from Nazi Germany?

By the turn of the 1950s, the situation had become clear. Great-Russian chauvinism of the late 1930s, combined with the Cold War, the campaign against cosmopolitanism, and sweeping purges in academic and cultural institutions, made Jews an ideal “internal enemy.”

The documents are organized not only chronologically but thematically. Several recurring threads can be followed, including “letters from below” demanding that the authorities “pay attention to the Jewish problem” in one form or another. Reports from the provinces begin with Nadezhda Krupskaya’s 1938 letter to Stalin warning that in schools “great-power chauvinism is beginning to show its little horns.”

By the late 1940s, letters prompted by everyday incidents had become more numerous. One 1944 document reports: “On September 18, composer Mokrousov, having drunk heavily, entered a billiard room saying, ‘When will there finally be no Yids among us and Russia belong to Russians?’ He approached composer Kruchinin, grabbed him by the collar, shook him and said: ‘Tell me, are you a Yid or a Russian?’ Kruchinin replied: ‘I was and will remain a Yid’—although in fact he was Russian.”

From the top down, such letters are answered indirectly by party-meeting records and documents of councils for religious affairs. A 1949 record states: “The struggle against minyans has been conducted on the Council’s instructions for a number of years by imposing income tax on people who provide their apartments for minyans, as well as by administrative measures.”

The collection ends with several anonymous, unexpectedly hopeful letters to the country’s leadership—not from after March 1953, when the campaign was temporarily halted, but from the late 1940s while it was still in full force. One anonymous writer in 1949 pleaded: “I am suffocating. Let us breathe freely with a freedom equal for all nationalities, without criminally arrogant privileges for Russians—this new mask of genuine Nazism.”

Sergei Bondarenko

Antisemitism in the Soviet Union: Its Roots and Consequences. Jerusalem, 1979

This book from the Aliyah publishing house is a three-part collection consisting of papers from a seminar on Soviet antisemitism, journalist Mikhail Baitalsky’s social essay “What Is New in Antisemitism,” and a thematic selection of late-1970s Soviet press publications.

The atmosphere of the late Brezhnev era was unlike any other period in Soviet history. On the one hand, unwritten rules connected with the notorious “fifth line” for nationality had penetrated almost every part of public life. Many of the published reports describe discrimination against Jews in research institutes, at workplaces and in appointments to public positions. On the other hand, the Soviet Union actively attacked the State of Israel for its regional foreign policy, depicting Zionism as a new form of fascism.

Within this setting, the movement of “refuseniks” developed—people who sought the right to leave for Israel and renounce Soviet citizenship.

Official and unofficial repression against this group remained concealed, which fundamentally distinguished it from late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century policies such as the Pale of Settlement and recurring pogroms. Seminar papers describe tacit arrangements between superiors and subordinates and the everyday mechanics of discrimination. One participant recalled of a manager: “He had a mystical fear of Jews, so he kept ten Jewish fools around. Every time he looked at them he reassured himself that there was nothing to fear and life could go on.”

The third part of the book is particularly interesting: a carefully assembled reader of some of the most striking Soviet newspaper articles, naturally not about officially nonexistent Soviet antisemitism but about “world Zionism.” One article declares: “The Zionists want to obtain from Soviet people by ‘peaceful means’ what their imperialist patrons have so far failed to obtain by weapons”—meaning, for example, basic civil freedoms such as the right to leave the country. The collection closes with passages from nationalist samizdat denouncing a “cosmopolitan Orthodox antechamber of Zionism.”

Sergei Bondarenko

Felix Kandel, The Book of Times and Events, Vol. 6, 2007

The life of Felix Kandel, author of a multivolume history of Russian Jewry, resembles the history he describes. He had been a successful Soviet writer and, together with Vyacheslav Kotenochkin and Arkady Khait, helped create the popular animated series Well, Just You Wait! under the pen name F. Kamov. In the middle of that success, he applied to emigrate to Israel. His request was, of course, refused.

Four long years as an unemployed refusenik eventually produced a result: he was permitted to leave for Israel. There he hosted a program on the Voice of Israel devoted to the history of Russian Jewry. That program became the basis of The Book of Times and Events; its sixth volume deals with the postwar history of Soviet Jews.

Kandel’s essays have a highly distinctive style. His books have neither a conventional plot nor a strict chronology. Instead, each subject determines the structure, which develops almost like musical variations. The book consists largely of a heterogeneous chorus of participants’ voices, lightly framed by Kandel’s own historical, sometimes somewhat elevated commentary.

It is important to note that these are essays on the history of those Jews who preserved and strengthened their identity after the war and the Holocaust despite postwar antisemitism. It is the history of people, many of whom decided to leave the USSR because it had become clear that they were not welcome there and never would be.

Alongside bitter statements such as “it would have been better if Hitler had killed me,” one also hears the legendary refrain “we are still alive,” which would be especially interesting to an imaginary ethnographer of totalitarianism. Kandel recounts, for example: “When the day came, the rabbi said that he had waited many years for such a circumcision... Women were not discharged from the maternity hospital before the ninth day... and for a quarter of a century the rabbi had not performed a single circumcision on the eighth day, as the Torah commands.”

Ivan Shemanov

Valentin Oskotsky, Polemics: Stalinism, Xenophobia and Antisemitism in Contemporary Russian Literature. Moscow, 2005

The material for Polemics is a whole series of journalistic and supposedly “historical” books and articles published in Russia during the 1990s and early 2000s on related great-power nationalist themes.

A central subject of Oskotsky’s analysis is the connection between the collapse of the USSR, growing fascination with alternative history and New Age thinking. In the book, a new reassessment of Stalinism sits alongside the old antisemitic explanation of terror—“it was all the Jewish commissars”—while thoroughly studied historical events such as the Beilis affair and the Katyn massacre are subjected to “new readings.”

The word “literature” in the subtitle is only partly justified. Most of the material is a peculiar stream of consciousness addressed to an audience already inclined to agree and prepared to accept books by, for example, Yuri Zhukov, including Generalissimo and other works of Stalinist hagiography.

For the history of Soviet and post-Soviet literary debate, however, Polemics is an excellent collection of xenophobic texts gathered in one place: denunciations of “all those Ehrenburgs, Kushners and Voinoviches” and attempts to defend supposedly authentically Russian subjects from them. One example concerning the war declares that Tvardovsky’s Vasily Tyorkin was allegedly an attempt to “privatize” the Great Patriotic War by replacing its true hero, the hardworking Russian soldier, with a “Jewish joker.”

Despite the diversity of the obsessions represented in the book, Oskotsky defined his central subject very precisely in 2005, identifying what by 2017 had become commonplace: “a relapse of revived Stalinism.”

Sergei Bondarenko

Vladimir Gelfand, Diary 1941–1946, 2016

It is generally accepted that a diary can be more precise than memoirs because it lacks the distance of many intervening years. At the same time, diaries are often written with an awareness that other people may eventually read them, and in that sense they can resemble memoirs: the writer may smooth sharp edges.

For reasons that are not entirely clear, the recently published ROSSPEN edition of Soviet serviceman Vladimir Gelfand’s diary is very different. It has all the advantages of a documentary narrative written without temporal distance, yet the author often seems not to imagine that anyone else will ever read what he writes.

The strongest “indicator of honesty” is Gelfand’s account of his sexual experiences: his uncertainty about his own masculinity, his experiments in relations with women and the advantages he sometimes had as an occupying soldier. Some passages are exceptionally explicit.

Gelfand’s three central subjects are war, women and antisemitism. He experienced his Jewish identity painfully. He was an ordinary Soviet citizen who did not always understand what lay behind the nationality question. Antisemitism surrounded him so persistently that he at times felt it necessary to pretend not to be Jewish in order not to make his situation worse.

The diary can therefore be recommended to anyone interested in the unvarnished everyday reality of the Second World War. It is also an extraordinary source on the life and doubts of a young man facing a grotesquely important series of choices and desperately wanting to be “normal.”

One entry reads: “The ward really did turn out to be good. There were almost no antisemites here, and except for a few incidents I began to forget that I was a Jew. Only for some reason my postcards began disappearing... I thought the fellows had stolen them for cigarette paper, so I hid everything more carefully and locked my bags. But even that did not help.”

Ivan Shemanov

• “Who Is an Antisemite?”
• “State Antisemitism in the USSR, 1938–1953: Documents.”
• “Antisemitism in the Soviet Union: Its Roots and Consequences.”
• Felix Kandel — “The Book of Times and Events. Vol. 6: History of the Jews of the Soviet Union (1938–1953; 1970).”
• Valentin Oskotsky — “Polemics: Stalinism, Xenophobia and Antisemitism in Contemporary Russian Literature.”
• Vladimir Gelfand — “Diary 1941–1946.”