Jews Under the Soviet Union
In spite of persecution, the Jewish population in the Russian Empire expanded rapidly during the nineteenth century. Later, on the eve of World War I, it was estimated at 5.2 million. Jewish culture had flourished within the bounds imposed on their community, Jews were becoming more active politically, and the more radical among them joined the spreading revolutionary movements.
For Jews, World War I and the Civil War that followed the revolutions in Russia were great calamities. The Pale of Settlement was the area where most of the prolonged military conflict took place, and Jews were killed indiscriminately by cossack armies, Russian White armies, Ukrainian nationalist forces, and anarchist peasant armies. In addition, the emergence of an independent Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia and the annexation of Bessarabia by Romania left large numbers of Jews outside the Soviet state borders. By 1922 the Jewish population in the Soviet Union was less than half of what it had been in the former Russian Empire.
The early years of the Soviet state provided unusual opportunities for Jews to mainstream into Soviet society. Although the majority of Jews had opposed the Bolsheviks during the Civil War, many supported the creation of the new, "non-national" state, which they expected would tolerate Jews. Hundreds of thousands of Jews were integrated into Soviet cultural and economic life, and many Jews occupied key positions in both areas. Jews were particularly numerous in higher education and in scientific institutions. Official anti-Semitism ceased, restrictions on Jewish settlement were banned, Jewish culture flourished, and Jewish sections of the CPSU were established.
On June 13, 1934 the Yiddish daily newspaper in Moscow, Emess (Truth) published a laudatory message to the then chairman of the Soviet government, Mikhail Kalinin, that was signed by 29 of the foremost American Yiddish writers and poets, (most of them non-Communists and even anti-Communists). Morris Winchevsky, the grandfather of the Yiddish socialist movement, was welcomed by units of the Red Army when he visited the Soviet Union.
Many Jews, such as Leon Trotsky, Grigorii V. Zinov'ev, Lev B. Kamenev, Lazar M. Kaganovich, and Maksim M. Litvinov, occupied the most prominent positions in party leadership. The purges in the mid- to late 1930s, however, reduced considerably the Jewish intelligentsia's participation in political life, particularly in the party's top echelons.
After Zinoviev and Kamenev moved to the opposition, the situation changed dramatically for the worse. Now there was a full opportunity to tell the workers that there are three "disgruntled Jewish intellectuals" at the head of the opposition. Under the directive of Stalin, Uglanov in Moscow and Kirov in Leningrad carried out this line systematically and almost completely openly. To make it easier to demonstrate to the workers the distinction between the “old” course and the “new” one, the Jews, even if they were selflessly devoted to the general line, were removed from their responsible posts. Not only in the village, but even in Moscow factories, the persecution of the opposition already in 1926 often took on quite a clear anti-Semitic character.
In the early 1930s Alexander Chemerinski, the secretary of the Jewish Section of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Yevsektzia), and some of his associates were executed. Whatever criticism there may be of the Yevsektzia, is murder a proper verdict in a socialist society? In 1936-37 there disappeared the gentle Shimen Dimanshtein, a personal friend of Lenin’s and the Commissar of Jewish Affairs in Lenin’s cabinet; a number of the leaders of the Geserd society which organized agricultural settlements for Jews, disappeared, including Mikhail Rashkes who came to the United States in the 1920s as a Geserd representative. It is true that this terrible wave of arrests and executions was part of a much larger, more gruesome picture which began with Stalin’s plot to kill his opponent Kirov in 1934 along with Kirov’s supporters who wanted him to replace Stalin.
The 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union was particularly horrific for Soviet Jewry. About 2.5 million Jews were annihilated, often by collaborators among the native populations in the occupied territories who aided the Germans in killing Jews. Paradoxically, in Soviet territories that escaped German occupation, anti-Semitism also reemerged in the local population's resentment against the often better educated, wealthier Jews who were evacuated there before the advancing German armies.
in January 1953 Stalin had a plan drawn up to expel the Jews from the large Soviet cities and send them to the northern areas of the country. However, Stalin’s end which came, or was made to come, in time nullified this horrible plan. August 12, 1952 began an especially grave period for the Jews in the Soviet Union, a period which possibly may be registered in history as one in which the Soviet government sought to put an end to the remnants of Soviet Jewish life. The broadened and intensive old-new “anti-Zionist” campaign was an effort to diminish the national (or ethnic group) rights of the Jews in the Soviet Union, to hasten the process of enforced assimilation, to isolate the Soviet Jews not only spiritually but also physically from the Jews in the rest of the world, including from their relatives.
The Folks-Shtimmeh in Warsaw issued the now historic article of April 4, 1956 entitled, “Our Distress and Our Consolation,” which described the repression of the Yiddish culture in the Soviet Union and the fate of its builders. On July 18, 1956 the then general-secretary of the American Communist Party, Eugene Dennis, had an article in the New York Daily Worker on Khruschev’s revelations of Stalin’s crimes that included two rather mild lines: “Nothing can justify the snuffing out of the lives of more than a score of Jewish cultural figures.” Yet, the Pravda in Moscow which carried the translation of Dennis’s article knocked out these two lines! Almost all the Yiddish writers and cultural workers in the Soviet Union, hundreds of them, were jailed and sentenced to labor camps and many of them never returned or they returned utterly broken in health.
Anti-Zionism serving as a mask for anti-Semitism has a history in the Soviet Union of many years, at least since 1970 when the Moscow paper, Komsomolskaya Pravda, began to print Yevseyev’s book, Fascism Under a Blue Sky (meaning Israel). Since then scores of anti-Semitic books have been published, along with a barrage of articles in newspapers and magazines. Besides Yevseyev there is now an entire stable of these anti-Zionist but actually anti-Semitic writers. These include Bolshakov, Yemelyanov, Ivanov, Skurlatov, Kolesnikov, Solodar, Begun, Korneyev, Dmitri Zhukov, Modzhorian and others. These persons are conducting a broad anti-Semitic propaganda in Russian and in foreign languages for the entire world that clminaged with the establishment of an All-Union Anti-Zionist Committee on April 1, 1983.
The article, “Bearers of Culture with a Master Key,” by B. Kravtsov appeared in the Leningradskaya Pravda–everything is Pravda there, nothing but the whole truth!–of April 19 and 20, 1983. This article was published soon after the Anti-Zionist Committee’s Appeal in the Moscow Pravda of April 1, 1983 to everyone in the Soviet Union, to the workers, kolkhoz farmers, scientists, writers, musicians, etc., that they should all mobilize themselves against the shock brigade of international imperialism, against Zionism!
Jews were the most dispersed nationality in the Soviet Union. In 1989 a majority of the 1.4 million Jews in the Soviet Union lived in the three Slavic republics. Approximately 536,000 lived in the Russian Republic, 486,000 in the Ukrainian Republic, and 112,000 in the Belorussian Republic. Large Jewish minorities also lived in the Uzbek and Moldavian republics, and smaller numbers of Jews lived in all the remaining republics.
Although the Jewish (Yevreyskaya) Autonomous Oblast in the Soviet Far East was designated as the homeland of the Soviet Jews, only 8,887 Jews lived there in 1989, just over 4 percent of the population of the oblast. Never high, the number of Jews in the Jewish Autonomous Oblast has been declining--14,269, or 8.8 percent, of the oblast's population in 1959 and 11,452, or 6.6 percent, in 1970.
Between 1959 and 1989, the Jewish population in the Soviet Union declined by about 900,000. The decline was attributed to several factors--low birth rate, intermarriage, concealment of Jewish identity, and emigration. Although 83 percent of the Jews regarded Russian as their native language in 1979, Soviet authorities recognized Yiddish as the national language of Soviet Jewry. Small groups of Soviet Jews spoke other "Jewish" languages: in Soviet Central Asia some Jews spoke a Jewish dialect of Tadzhik, in the Caucasus area Jews spoke a form of Tat, while those in the Georgian Republic used their own dialect of the Georgian language.
Soviet Jews were overwhelmingly urban. In 1979 over 98 percent of all Jews in the Soviet Union lived in urban areas. Four cities in particular -- Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, and Odessa -- had large concentrations of Jews. Along with being the most urbanized nationality, in the 1970s Jews also ranked first among all nationalities in educational level and in numbers of scientific workers per thousand. Traditionally, Jews have been highly represented in the CPSU, and their membership exceeded considerably their proportion of the total population. Soviet statistics show that 5.2 percent of all CPSU members in 1922 were Jews; in 1927 the figure declined to 4.3 percent. In 1976 the figure was 1.9 percent, almost three times the percentage of Jews in the general population.
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