200 years together 700-775

“foreign currency speculations,” another – with bribes, and still another later introduced capital punishment for the aforementioned crimes, at the same time lawlessly applying the death penalty retroactively, for the crimes committed before those decrees were issued (as, for example, the case of J. Rokotov and B. Faybishenko). Executions started in the very first year. During the first nine trials, eleven individuals were sentenced to death – among them were “perhaps, six Jews.”2861 The Jewish Encyclopedia states it more specifically, “In 19611964, thirty-nine Jews were executed for economic crimes in the RSFSR and seventy-nine – in Ukraine,” and forty-three Jews in other republics.2862 In these trials, “the vast majority of defendants were Jews.” (The publicity was such that the court reports indicated the names and patronymics of the defendants, which was the normal order of pleadings, yet it was getting “absolutely clear from that that they were Jews.”2863) Next, in a large court trial in Frunze in 1962, nineteen out of forty-six defendants were apparently Jewish. “There is no reason to think that this new policy was conceived as a system of anti-Jewish measures. Yet immediately upon enforcement, the new laws acquired distinct anti-Jewish flavor,” – the author of the quote obviously points out to the publication of the full names of defendants, including Jewish ones; other than that, neither the courts, nor the government, nor the media made any generalizations or direct accusations against the Jews. And even when Sovetskaya Kyrgizia wrote that “they occupied different posts, but they were closely linked to each other,” it never clarified the begged question “how were they linked?” The newspaper treated this issue with silence, thus pushing the reader to the thought that the nucleus of the criminal organization was composed of the “closely linked” individuals. Yet “closely linked by” what? By their Jewishness. So the newspaper “emphasized the Jews in this case.”2864 … Yet people can be “closely linked” by any illegal transaction, greed, swindling or fraud. And, amazingly, nobody argued that those individuals could be innocent (though they could have been innocent). Yet to name them was equal to Jew-baiting. Next, in January 1962, came the Vilnius case of speculators in foreign currency. All eight defendants were Jews (during the trial, non-Jewish members of the political establishment involved in the case escaped public naming – a usual Soviet trick). This time, there was an explicit anti-Jewish sentiment from the prosecution: “The deals were struck in a synagogue, and the arguments were settled with the help of wine.”2865 S. Schwartz is absolutely convinced that this legal and economic harassment was nothing else but rampant anti-Semitism, yet he completely disregards “the tendency of Jews to concentrate their activity in the specific spheres of economy.” Similarly, the entire Western media interpreted this as a 2861С. Шварц. Евреи в Советском Союзе…, с. 326-327, 329. 2862КЕЭ, т. 8, с. 261. 2863Н. Шапиро. Слово рядового советского еврея // Русский антисемитизм и евреи, с. 55. 2864С. Шварц. Евреи в Советском Союзе…, с. 330-333. 2865Там же, с. 333-334.
brutal campaign against Jews, the humiliation and isolation of the entire people; Bertrand Russell sent a letter of protest to Khrushchev and got a personal response from the Soviet leader.2866 However, after that, the Soviet authorities apparently had second thoughts when they handled the Jews. In the West, the official Soviet anti-Semitism began to be referred to as “the most pressing issue” in the USSR (ignoring any more acute issues) and “the most proscribed subject.” (Though there were numerous other proscribed issues such as forced collectivization or the surrender of three million Red Army soldiers in the year of 1941 alone, or the murderous nuclear “experimentation” on our own Soviet troops on the Totskoye range in 1954.) Of course, after Stalin’s death, the Communist Party avoided explicit anti-Jewish statements. Perhaps, they practiced incendiary “invitation-only meetings” and “briefings” – that would have been very much in the Soviet style. Solomon Schwartz rightly concludes: “Soviet anti-Jewish policy does not have any sound or rational foundation,” the strangulation of the Jewish cultural life “appears puzzling. How can such bizarre policy be explained?”2867 Still, when all living things in the country were being choked, could one really expect that such vigorous and agile people would escape a similar lot? To that, the Soviet foreign policy agendas of 1960s added their weight: the USSR was designing an anti-Israel campaign. Thus, they came up with a convenient, ambiguous and indefinite term of “anti-Zionism,” which became “a sword of Damocles hanging above the entire Jewish population of the country.”2868 Campaigning against “Zionism” in the press became a sort of impenetrable shield as its obvious anti-Semitic nature became unprovable. Moreover, it sounded menacing and dangerous – “Zionism is the instrument of the American imperialism.” So the “Jews had to prove their loyalty in one way or other, to somehow convince the people around them that they had no connection to their own Jewishness, especially to Zionism.”2869 The feelings of ordinary Jews in the Soviet Union became the feelings of the oppressed as vividly expressed by one of them: “Over the years of persecutions and vilifications, the Jews developed a certain psychological complex of suspicion to any contact coming from non-Jews. In everything they are ready to see implicit or explicit hints on their nationality …. The Jews can never publicly declare their Jewishness, and it is formally accepted that this should be kept silent, as if it was a vice, or a past crime.”2870 An incident in Malakhovka in October 1959 added substantially to that atmosphere. On the night of October 4, in Malakhovka, a settlement “half an hour from Moscow … with 30,000 inhabitants, about 10% of whom are Jews …, the roof of the synagogue caught fire along with … the house of the Jewish 2866Обмен письмами между Б. Расселом и Н.С. Хрущёвым // Правда, 1963, 1 марта, с. 1. 2867С. Шварц. Евреи в Советском Союзе…, с. 421-422. 2868Э. Финкельштейн. Евреи в СССР… // Страна и мир. 1989, № 1, с. 65. 2869Э. Финкельштейн. Евреи в СССР… // Страна и мир, 1989, № 1, с. 66-67. 2870Н. Шапиро. Слово рядового советского еврея // Русский антисемитизм и евреи, с. 48, 55.
cemetery keeper … [and] the wife of the keeper died in the fire. On the same night, leaflets were scattered and posted across Malakhovka: `Away with the Jews in commerce! … We saved them from the Germans … yet they became arrogant so fast that the Russian people do not understand any longer… who’s living on whose land.´”2871 Growing depression drove some Jews to such an extreme state of mind as that described by D. Shturman: some “Jewish philistines developed a hatred toward Israel, believing it to be the  generator of anti-Semitism in the Soviet politics. I remember the words of one succesful Jewish teacher: `One good bomb dropped on Israel would make our life much easier.´”2872 Yet that was an ugly exception indeed. In general, the rampant anti-Zionist campaign triggered a “consolidation of the sense of Jewishness in people and the growth of sympathy towards Israel as the outpost of the Jewish nation.”2873 There is yet another explanation of the social situation in those years: yes, under Khrushchev, “fears for their lives had become the things of the past for the Soviet Jews,” but “the foundations of new anti-Semitism had been laid,” as the young generation of political establishment fought for caste privileges, “seeking to occupy the leading positions in arts, science, commerce, finance, etc. There the new Soviet aristocracy encountered Jews, whose share in those fields was traditionally high.” The “social structure of the Jewish population, which was mainly concentrated in the major centers of the country, reminded the ruling elite of their own class structure.”2874 Doubtless, such encounter did take place; it was an epic “crew change” in the Soviet ruling establishment, switching from the Jewish elite to the Russian one. It had clearly resulted in antagonism and I remember those conversations among the Jews during Khrushchev’s era – they were full of not only ridicule, but also of bad insults with the ex-villagers, “muzhiks,” who have infiltrated the establishment. Yet altogether all the various social influences combined with the great prudence of the Soviet authorities led to dramatic alleviation of “prevalence and acuteness of modern Soviet anti-Semitism” by 1965, which became far inferior to what had been observed “during the war and the first post-war years,” and it appears that “a marked attenuation, maybe even a complete dying out of `the percentage quote´ is happening.”2875 Overall, in the 1960s the Jewish worldview was rather positive. This is what we consistently hear from different authors. (Contrast this to what we just read, that “the new anti-Semitism grew in strength in the 1960s.”) The same opinion was expressed again twenty years later –
2871Социалистический вестник, 1959, № 12, с. 240-241. 2872Д. Штурман. Советский антисемитизм — причины и прогнозы: [Семинар] // “22”, 1978, № 3, с. 180. 2873С. Шварц. Евреи в Советском Союзе…, с. 395. 2874Э. Финкелъштейн. Евреи в СССР… // Страна и мир, 1989, № 1, с. 64-65. 2875С. Шварц. Евреи в Советском Союзе…, с. 372, 409.
“Khrushchev’s era was one of the most peaceful periods of the Soviet history for the Jews.”2876 “In 1956-1957, many new Zionist societies sprang up in the USSR, bringing together young Jews who previously did not show much interest in Jewish national problems or Zionism. An important impetus for the awakening of national consciousness among Soviet Jews and for the development of a sense of solidarity with the State of Israel was the Suez Crisis [1956].” Later, “The International Youth Festival [Moscow, 1957] became a catalyst for the revival of the Zionist movement in the USSR among a certain portion of Soviet Jews … Between the festival and the Six-Day War [1967], Zionist activity in the Soviet Union was gradually expanding. Contacts of Soviet Jews with the Israeli Embassy became more frequent and less dangerous.” Also, “the importance of Jewish Samizdat increased dramatically.”2877 During the so-called Khrushchev’s “thaw” period (the end of 1950s to the beginning of the 1960s), Soviet Jews were spiritually re-energized; they shook off the fears and distress of the previous age of the “Doctors’ Plot” and the persecution of “cosmopolitan.” It “even became fashionable” in the metropolitan society “to be a Jew”; the Jewish motif entered Samizdat and poetic soirees then so popular among the young. Rimma Kazakova even ventured to declare her Jewish identity from the stage. Yevtushenko quickly caught the air and expressed it in 1961 in his Babi Yar2878, proclaiming himself a Jew in spirit. His poem (and the courage of Literaturnaya Gazeta) was a literary trumpet call for all of Soviet and world Jewry. Yevtushenko recited his poem during a huge number of poetic soirees, always accompanied by a roar of applause. After a while, Shostakovich, who often ventured into Jewish themes, set Yevtushenko’s poem into his 13th Symphony. Yet its public performance was limited by the authorities. Babi Yar spread among Soviet and foreign Jewries as a reinvigorating and healing blast of air, a truly “revolutionary act … in the development of the social consciousness in the Soviet Union”; “it became the most significant event since the dismissal of the `Doctors’ Plot.´”2879 In 1964-65 Jewish themes returned into popular literature; take, for example, Summer in Sosnyaki by Anatoliy Rybakov or the diary of Masha Rolnik2880 (“written apparently under heavy influence of Diary of Anne Frank”2881). “After the ousting of Khrushchev from all his posts, the official policy towards Jews was softened somewhat. The struggle against Judaism abated and nearly all restrictions on baking matzah were abolished …. Gradually, the
2876Михаил Хейфец. Новая «аристократия»? // Грани: Журнал литературы, искусства, науки и общ.-политической мысли. Франкфурт-на-Майне, 1987, № 146, с. 189. 2877КЕЭ, т. 8, с. 262-263. 2878R. Rutman // Soviet Jewish Affairs, London, 1974, Vol. 4, № 2, p. 11. 2879С. Шварц. Евреи в Советском Союзе…, с. 371. 2880Соответственно: Новый мир, 1964, № 12; Мария Рольникайте. Я должна рассказать // Звезда, 1965, № 2 и № 3. 2881С. Шварц. Евреи в Советском Союзе…, с. 373.
campaign against economic crimes faded away too ….” Yet “the Soviet press unleashed a propaganda campaign against Zionist activities among the Soviet Jews and their connections to the Israeli Embassy.”2882 All these political fluctuations and changes in the Jewish policies in the Soviet Union did not pass unnoticed but served to awaken the Jews. In the 1959 Census, only 21% Jews named Yiddish as their first language (in 1926 -72%).2883 Even in 1970s they used to say that “Russian Jewry, which was [in the past] the most Jewish Jewry in the world, became the least Jewish.”2884 “The current state of Soviet society is fraught with destruction of Jewish spiritual and intellectual potential.”2885 Or as another author put it: the Jews in the Soviet Union were neither “allowed to assimilate,” nor were they “allowed to be Jews.”2886 Yet Jewish identity was never subdued during the entire Soviet period. In 1966 the official mouthpiece Sovetish Heymland claimed that “even assimilated Russian-speaking Jews still retain their unique character, distinct from that of any other segment of population.”2887 Not to mention the Jews of Odessa, Kiev, and Kharkov, who “sometimes were even snooty about their Jewishness – to the extent that they did not want to befriend a goy.”2888 Scientist Leo Tumerman ( already in Israel in 1977) recalls the early Soviet period, when he used to “reject any nationalism.” Yet now, looking back at those years: “I am surprised to notice what I had overlooked then: despite what appeared to be my full assimilation into the Russian life, the entire circle of my close and intimate friends at that time was Jewish.”2889 The sincerity of his statement is certain – the picture is clear. Such things were widespread and I witnessed similar situations quite a few times, and Russians people did not mind such behavior at all. Another Jewish author notes: in the USSR “non-religious Jews of all walks of life hand in hand defended the principle of `racial purity.´” He adds: “Nothing could be more natural. People for whom the Jewishness is just an empty word are very rare, especially among the unassimilated [Jews].”2890 Natan Sharansky’s testimonial, given shortly after his immigration to Israel, is also typical: “Much of my Jewishness was instilled into me by my family. Although our family was an assimilated one, it nevertheless was Jewish.” “My father, an ordinary Soviet journalist, was so fascinated with the revolutionary ideas of `happiness for all´ and not just for the Jews, that he became an 2882КЕЭ, т. 8, с. 262, 264. 2883Там же, с. 295, 302. 2884Г. Розенблюм. Крушение Чуда…: [Беседа с В. Перелъманом] // ВМ, Тель-Авив, 1977, №24, с. 120. 2885Л. Цигельман-Дымерская. Советский антисемитизм — причины и прогнозы: [Семинар] // “22”, 1978, №3, с. 175. 2886Ю. Штерн. Ситуация неустойчива…: [Интервью] // “22”, 1984, № 38, с. 135. 2887Л. Шапиро. Евреи в Советской России после Сталина // КРЕ-2, с. 379. 2888Ю. Штерн. Двойная ответственность: [Интервью] // “22”, 1981, № 21, с. 127. 2889“22”*, 1978, № 1, с. 204. 2890А. Этерман. Истина с близкого расстояния // “22”, 1987, № 52, с. 112.
absolutely loyal Soviet citizen.” Yet in 1967 after the Six-Day War and later in 1968 after Czechoslovakia, “I suddenly realized an obvious difference between myself and non-Jews around me … a kind of a sense of the fundamental difference between my Jewish consciousness and the national consciousness of the Russians.”2891 And here is another very thoughtful testimonial (1975): “The efforts spent over the last hundred years by Jewish intellectuals to reincarnate themselves into the Russian national form were truly titanic. Yet it did not give them balance of mind; on the contrary, it rather made them to feel the bitterness of their bi-national existence more acutely.” And “they have an answer to the tragic question of Aleksandr Blok: `My Russia, my life, are we to drudge through life together?´ To that question, to which a Russian as a rule gives an unambiguous answer, a member of Russian-Jewish intelligentsia used to reply (sometimes after self-reflection): `No, not together. For the time being, yes, side by side, but not together´… A duty is no substitute for Motherland.” And so “the Jews felt free from obligations at all sharp turns of Russian history.”2892 Fair enough. One can only hope for all Russian Jews to get such clarity and acknowledge this dilemma. Yet usually the problem in its entirety is blamed on “anti-Semitism”: “Excluding us from everything genuinely Russian, their anti-Semitism simultaneously barred us from all things Jewish …. Anti-Semitism is terrible not because of what it does to the Jews (by imposing restrictions on them), but because of what it does with the Jews by turning them into neurotic, depressed, stressed, and defective human beings.”2893 Still, those Jews, who had fully woken up to their identity, were very quickly, completely, and reliably cured from such a morbid condition. Jewish identity in the Soviet Union grew stronger as they went through the historical ordeals predestined for Jewry by the 20th Century. First, it was the Jewish Catastrophe  during the Second World War. (Through the efforts of official Soviet muffling and obscuring, Soviet Jewry only comprehended its full scope later.) Another push was given by the campaign against “cosmopolitans” in 19491950. Then there was a very serious threat of a massacre by Stalin, eliminated by his timely death. And with Khrushchev’s “thaw” and after it, later in the 1960s, Soviet Jewry quickly awoke spiritually, already sensing its unique identity. During the second half of the 1950s, “the growing sense of bitterness, spread over large segments of Soviet Jewry”, lead to “consolidation of the sense of national solidarity.”2894
2891А. Щаранский. [Интервью] // “22”, 1986, № 49. с. 111-112. 2892Б. Орлов. Не те вы учили алфавиты // ВМ, Тель-Авив, 1975, № 1, с. 129, 132-133. 2893В. Богуславский. Галуту — с надеждой // “22”, 1985, № 40, с. 133, 134. 2894С. Шварц. Евреи в Советском Союзе…, с. 415.
But “only in the late 1960s did a very small but committed group of scientists (note, they were not humanitarians; the most colorful figure among them was Alexander Voronel) begin rebuilding of Jewish national consciousness in Russia.”2895 And then against the nascent national consciousness of Soviet Jews, the Six-Day War suddenly broke out and instantly ended in what might have seemed a miraculous victory. Israel has ascended in their minds and Soviet Jews awoke to their spiritual and consanguineous kinship [with Israel]. But the Soviet authorities, furious at Nasser’s disgraceful  defeat, immediately attacked Soviet Jews with the thundering campaign against the “Judeo-Zionist-Fascism,” insinuating  that all the Jews were “Zionists” and claiming that the “global conspiracy” of Zionism “is the expected and inevitable product of the entirety of Jewish history, Jewish religion, and the resultant Jewish national character” and “because of the consistent pursuit of the ideology of racial supremacy and apartheid, Judaism turned out to be a very convenient religion for securing world dominance.”2896 The campaign on TV and in the press was accompanied by a dramatic break of diplomatic relations with Israel. The Soviet Jews had many reasons to fear: “It looked like it was going to come to calls for a pogrom.”2897 But underneath this scare a new and already unstoppable explosion of Jewish national consciousness was growing and developing. “Bitterness, resentment, anger, and the sense of social insecurity were accruing for a final break up which would lead to complete severing of all ties with [this] country and [this] society – to emigration.”2898 “The victory of the Israeli Army contributed to the awakening of national consciousness among the many thousands of almost completely assimilated Soviet Jews …. The process of national revival has began …. The activity of Zionist groups in cities all across the country surged …. In 1969, there were attempts to create a united Zionist Organization [in the USSR] …. An increasing number of Jews applied to emigrate to Israel.”2899 And the numerous refusals to grant exit visas led to the failed attempt to hijack an airplane on June 15, 1970. The following “Dymshits-Kuznetsov hijacking affair” can be considered a historic landmark in the fate of Soviet Jewry.
2895Г. Файн. В роли высокооплачиваемых швейцаров // ВМ, Тель-Авив. 1976, № 12. с. 133-134. 2896Р. Нудельман. Советский антисемитизм — причины и прогнозы: [Семинар] // “22”, 1978, № 3, с. 144. 2897Э. Финкельштейн. Евреи в СССР… // Страна и мир, 1989, № 1, с. 67. 2898Там же. 2899КЕЭ, т. 8. с. 267.
Chapter 24. Breaking away from Bolshevism
At the beginning of the 20th century, Europe imagined itself to be on the threshold of worldwide enlightenment. No one could have predicted the strength with which nationalism would explode in that very century among all nations of the world. One hundred years later it seems nationalist feelings are not about to die soon (the very message that international socialists have been trying to drum into our heads for the whole century), but instead are gaining strength. Yet, does not the multi-national nature of humanity provide variety and wealth? Erosion of nations surely would be an impoverishment for humanity, the entropy of the spirit. (And centuries of the histories of national cultures would then turn into irredeemably dead and useless antics.) The logic that it would be easier to manage such a uniform mankind fails by its petty reductionism. However, the propaganda in the Soviet empire harped non-stop in an importunately-triumphant manner about the imminent withering away and amalgamation of nations, proclaiming that no “national question” exists in our country, and that there is certainly no “Jewish question.” Yet why should not the Jewish question exist — the question of the unprecedented three-thousand-year-old existence of the nation, scattered all over the Earth, yet spiritulally soldered together despite all notions of the state and territoriality, and at the same time influencing the entire world history in the most lively and powerful way? Why should there not be a “Jewish question” given that all national questions come up at one time or other, even the “Gagauz question” [a small Christian Turkic people, who live in the Balkans and Eastern Europe]? Of course, no such silly doubt could ever arise, if the Jewish question were not the focus of many different political games. The same was true for Russia too. In pre-revolutionary Russian society, as we saw, it was the omission of the Jewish question that was considered “antiSemitic.” In fact, in the mind of the Russian public the Jewish question — understood as the question of civil rights or civil equality — developed into perhaps the central question of the whole Russian public life of that period, and certainly into the central node of the conscience of every individual, its acid test.
With the growth of European socialism, all national issues were increasingly recognized as merely regrettable obstacles to that great doctrine; all the more was the Jewish question (directly attributed to capitalism by Marx) considered a bloated hindrance. Mommsen wrote that in the circles of “Western-Russian socialist Jewry,” as he put it, even the slightest attempt to discuss the Jewish question was branded as “reactionary” and “anti-Semitic” (this was even before the Bund). Such was the iron standard of socialism inherited by the USSR. From 1918 the communists forbade (under threat of imprisonment or death) any separate treatment or consideration of the Jewish question (except sympathy for their suffering under the Tsars and positive attitudes for their active role in communism). The intellectual class voluntarily and willingly adhered to the new canon while others were required to follow it. This cast of thought persisted even through the Soviet-German war as if, even then, there was not any particular Jewish question. And even up to the demise of the USSR under Gorbachev, the authorities used to repeat hardheadedly: no, there is no Jewish question, no, no, no! (It was replaced by the “Zionist question.”) Yet already by the end of the World War II, when the extent of the destruction of the Jews under Hitler had dawned on the Soviet Jews, and then through Stalin’s “anti-cosmopolitan” campaign of the late 1940s, the Soviet intelligentsia realized that the Jewish question in the USSR does exist! And the pre-revolutionary understanding — that it is central to Russian society and to the conscience of every individual and that it is the “true measure of humanity”2900 — was also restored. In the West it was only the leaders of Zionism who confidently talked from the late 19th century about the historical uniqueness and everlasting relevance of the Jewish question (and some of them at the same time maintained robust links with diehard European socialism). And then the emergence of the state of Israel and the consequent storms around it added to the confusion of naive socialist minds of Europeans. Here I offer two small but at the time quite stirring and typical examples. In one episode of so-called “the dialogue between the East and the West” show (a clever Cold-War-period programme, where Western debaters were opposed by Eastern-European officials or novices who played off official nonsense for their own sincere convictions) in the beginning of 1967, a Slovak writer, Ladislav Mnacko, properly representing the socialist East, wittily noted that he never in his life had any conflict with the Communist authorities, except one case when his driver’s license was suspended for a traffic violation. His French opponent angrily said that at least in one other case, surely Mnacko should be in the opposition: when the uprising in neighboring Hungary was drowned in blood. But no, the suppression of Hungarian Uprising neither violated the peace of Mnacko’s mind, nor did it force him to say anything sharp or impudent. Then, a
2900В. Левитина. Русский театр и евреи. Иерусалим: Библиотека – Алия, 1988. Т. 1, с. 24.
few months passed after the “dialogue” and the Six-Day War broke out. At that point the Czechoslovak Government of Novotny, all loyal Communists, accused Israel of aggression and severed diplomatic relations with it. And what happened next? Mnacko — a Slovak married to a Jew — who had calmly disregarded the suppression of Hungary before, now was so outraged and agitated that he left his homeland and as a protest went to live in Israel. The second example comes from the same year. A famous French socialist, Daniel Meyer, at the moment of the Six-Day War had written in Le Monde, that henceforth he is: 1) ashamed to be a socialist — because of the fact that the Soviet Union calls itself a socialist country (well, when the Soviet Union was exterminating not only its own people but also other socialists — he was not ashamed); 2) ashamed of being a French (obviously due to the wrong political position of de Gaulle); and, 3) ashamed to be a human (wasn’t that too much?), and ashamed of all except being a Jew.2901 We are ready to accept both Mnacko’s outrage and Meyer’s anger, yet we would like to point out at the extreme intensity of their feelings — given the long history of their obsequious condoning of communism. Surely, the intensity of their feelings is also an aspect of the Jewish question in the 20th century. So in what way ”did the Jewish question not exist”? If one listened to American radio broadcasts aimed at the Soviet Union from 1950 to the 1980s, one might conclude that there was no other issue in the Soviet Union as important as the Jewish question. (At the same time in the United States, where the Jews “can be described as … the most privileged minority” and where they “gained an unprecedented status, the majority of [American Jews] still claimed that hatred and discrimination by their Christian compatriots was a grim fact of the modern life”;2902 yet because it would sound incredible if stated aloud, then the Jewish question does not exist, and to notice it and talk about it is unnecessary and improper.) We have to get used to talking about Jewish question not in a hush and fearfully, but clearly, articulately and firmly. We should do so not overflowing with passion, but sympathetically aware of both the unusual and difficult Jewish world history and centuries of our Russian history that are also full of significant suffering. Then the mutual prejudices, sometimes very intense, would disappear and calm reason would reign. Working on this book, I can’t help but notice that the Jewish question has been omnipresent in world history and it never was a national question in the narrow sense like all other national questions, but was always — maybe because of the nature of Judaism? — interwoven into something much bigger.
2901Daniel Mayer. J’ai honte d’etre socialist // Le Monde, 1967, 6 Juin, p. 3. 2902Michael Medved. The Jewish Question // National Review, 1997, July 28, p. 53.
When in the late 1960s I mused about the fate of the communist regime and felt that yes, it is doomed, my impression was strongly supported by the observation that so many Jews had already abandoned it. There was a period when they persistently and in unison supported the Soviet regime, and at that time the future definitely belonged to it. Yet now the Jews started to defect from it, first the thinking individuals and later the Jewish masses. Was this not a sure sign that the years of the Soviet rule are numbered? Yes, it was. So when exactly did it happen that the Jews, once such a reliable backbone of the regime, turned into almost its greatest adversary? Can we say that the Jews always struggled for freedom? No, for too many of them were the most zealous communists.  Yet now they turned their backs on it. And without them, the ageing Bolshevist fanaticism had not only lost some of its fervor, it actually ceased to be fanatical at all, rather it became lazy in the Russian way. After the Soviet-German War, the Jews became disappointed by Communist power: it turned out that they were worse off than before. We saw the main stages of this split. Initially, the support of the newborn state of Israel by the USSR had inspired the Soviet Jews. Then came the persecution of the “cosmopolitans” and the mainly Jewish intelligentsia (not the philistine masses yet) began to worry: communism pushes the Jews aside? oppresses them? The terrible threat of massacre by Stalin overwhelmed them as well — but it was short-lived and miraculously disappeared very soon. During the “interregnum,” [following Stalin’s death] and then under Khrushchev, Jewish hopes were replaced by dissatisfaction and the promised stable improvement failed to materialize. And then the Six-Day War broke out with truly biblical force, rocking both Soviet and world Jewry, and the Jewish national consciousness began to grow like an avalanche. After the Six-Day War, “much was changed … the action acquired momentum. Letters and petitions began to flood Soviet and international organizations. National life was revived: during the holidays it became difficult to get into a synagogue, underground societies sprang up to study Jewish history, culture and Hebrew.”2903 And then there was that rising campaign against “Zionism,” already linked to “imperialism,” and so the resentment grew among the Jews toward that increasingly alien and abominable and dull Bolshevism — where did such a monster come from? Indeed, for many educated Jews the departure from communism was painful as it is always difficult to part with an ideal — after all, was not it a “great, and perhaps inevitable, planetary experiment initiated in Russia in 1917; an experiment, based on ancient attractive and obviously high ideas, not all of
2903Михаил Хейфец. Место и время (еврейские заметки). Париж: Третья волна, 1978, с. 174.
which were faulty and many still retain their beneficial effect to this day…. Marxism requires educated minds.”2904 Many Jewish political writers strongly favored the term “Stalinism” — a convenient form to justify the earlier Soviet regime. It is difficult to part with the old familiar and sweet things, if it is really possible at all. There have been attempts to increase the influence of intellectuals on the ruling elite. Such was the Letter to the XXIII Congress (of the Communist Party) by G. Pomerants (1966). The letter asked the Communist Party to trust the “scientific and creative intelligentsia,” that “desires not anarchy but the rule of law … that wants not to destroy the existing system but to make it more flexible, more rational, more humane” and proposed to establish an advisory think tank, which would generally consult the executive leadership of the country.2905 The offer remained unanswered. And many souls long ached for such a wasted opportunity with such a “glorious” past. But there was no longer any choice . And so the Soviet Jews split away from communism. And now, while deserting it, they turned against it. And that was such a perfect opportunity — they could themselves, with expurgatory repentance, acknowledge their formerly active and cruel role in the triumph of communism in Russia. Yet almost none of them did (I discuss the few exceptions below). The above-mentioned collection of essays, Russia and the Jews, so heartfelt, so much needed and so timely when published in 1924 was fiercely denounced by Jewry. And even today, according to the opinion of the erudite scholar, Shimon Markish: “these days, nobody dares to defend those hook-nosed and burry commissars  because of fear of being branded pro-Soviet, a Chekist, a Godknows-what else…. Yet let me say in no uncertain terms: the behavior of those Jewish youths who joined the Reds is a thousand times more understandable than the reasons of the authors of that collection of works.”2906 Still, some Jewish authors began to recognize  certain things of the past as they really were, though in the most cautious terms: “It was the end of the role of the `Russian-Jewish intelligentsia´ that developed in the prewar and early postwar years and that was — to some degree sincerely — a bearer of Marxist ideology and that professed, however timidly and implicitly and contrary to actual practice, the ideals of liberalism, internationalism and humanism.”2907 A bearer of Marxist ideology? — Yes, of course. The ideals of internationalism?
2904Ю. Колкер // Русская мысль, 24 апреля 1987, с. 12. 2905Г. Померанц. Проект письма XXIII съезду // Неопубликованное. Frankfurt/Main: Посев, 1972, с. 269-276. 2906Ш. Маркиш. Ещё раз о ненависти к самому себе // “22”: Общественно-политический и литературный журнал еврейской интеллигенции из СССР в Израиле. Тель-Авив, 1980, № 16, с. 188. 2907Р. Нудельман. Советский антисемитизм — причины и прогнозы: [Семинар] // “22”, 1978, № 3, с. 147.
— Sure. Yet liberalism and humanism? — True, but only after Stalin’s death, while coming to senses. However, very different things can be inferred from the writings of the majority of Jewish publicists in the late Soviet Union. Looking back to the very year of 1917, they find that under communism there was nothing but Jewish suffering! “Among the many nationalities of the Soviet Union, the Jews have always been stigmatized as the least `reliable´ element.”2908 What incredibly short memory one should have to state such things in 1983? Always! And what about the 1920s? And the 1930s? To assert that they were then considered the least reliable?! Is it really possible to forget everything so completely? “If … one takes a bird’s-eye view of the entire history of the Soviet era, then the latter appears as one gradual process of destruction of the Jews.” Note — the entire history! We investigated this in the previous chapters and saw that even without taking into account Jewish over-representation in the top Soviet circles, there had been a period of well-being for many Jews with mass migration to cities, open access to higher education and the blossoming of Jewish culture. The author proceeds with a reservation: “Although there were …  certain `fluctuations´, the overall trend continued … Soviet power, destroying all nationalities, generally dealt with the Jews in the most brutal way.”2909 Another author considers a disaster even the early period when Lenin and the Communist Party called upon the Jews to help with state governance, and the call was heard, and the great masses of Jews from the shtetls of the hated Pale moved into the capital and the big cities, closer to the avant-garde [of the Revolution]”; he states that the “… formation of the Bolshevik regime that had turned the greater part of Jews into `déclassé´, impoverished and exiled them and destroyed their families” was a catastrophe for the “majority of the Jewish population.” (Well, that depends on one’spoint of view. And the author himself later notes: in the 1920s and 1930s, the “children of déclassé Jewish petty bourgeois were able to graduate from … the technical institutes and metropolitan universities and to become `commanders´ of the `great developments.´”) Then his reasoning becomes vague: “in the beginning of the century the main feature of Jewish activity was … a fascination … with the idea of building a new fair society”– yet the army of revolution “consisted of plain rabble — all those `who were nothing,´ [a quote from The Internationale].” Then, “after the consolidation of the regime” that rabble “decided to implement their motto and to `become all´ [also a quote from The Internationale], and finished off their own leaders….  And so the kingdom of rabble — unlimited totalitarianism — was established.” (And, in this context, the Jews had nothing to do with it, except that they were among the victimized leaders.) And the
2908Ф. Колкер. Новый план помощи советскому еврейству // “22”. 1983, № 31, с. 145. 2909Ю. Штерн. Ситуация неустойчива и потому опасна: [Интервью] // “22”, 1984, № 38, с. 130.
purge continued “for four decades” until the “mid-1950s”; then the last “bitter pill … according to the scenario of disappointments” was prescribd to the remaining “`charmed´ Jews.”2910 Again we see the same angle: the entire Soviet history was one of unending oppression and exclusion of the Jews. Yet now they wail in protest in unison: “We did not elect this regime!” Or even “it is not possible to cultivate a loyal Soviet elite among them [the Jews].”2911 Oh my God, was not this method working flawlessly for 30 years, and only later coming undone?  So where did all those glorious and famous names — whom we’ve seen in such numbers — came from? And why were their eyes kept so tightly shut that they couldn’t see the essence of Soviet rule for thirty to forty years? How is that that their eyes were opened only now? And what opened them? Well, it was mostly because of the fact that now that power had suddenly turned around and began pushing the Jews not only out of its ruling and administrative circles, but out of cultural and scientific establishements also. “The disappointment was so fresh and sore, that we did not have the strength, nor the courage to tell even our children about it. And what about the children? … For the great majority of them the main motivation was the same — graduate school, career, and so on.”2912 Yet soon they would have to examine their situation more closely.
In the 1970s we see examples of rather amazing agreement of opinions, unthinkable for the past half a century. For instance, Shulgin wrote in 1929: “We must acknowledge our past. The flat denial … claiming that the Jews are to blame for nothing — neither for the Russian Revolution, nor for the consolidation of Bolshevism, nor for the horrors of the communism — is the worst way possible….  It would be a great step forward if this groundless tendency to blame all the troubles of Russia on the Jews could be somewhat differentiated. It would be already great if any `contrasts´ could be found.”2913 Fortunately, such contrasts, and even more — comprehension, and even remorse — were voiced by some Jews. And, combined with the honest mind and rich life experience, they were quite clear. And this brings hope. Here’s Dan Levin, an American intellectual who immigrated to Israel: “It is no accident, that none of the American writers who attempted to describe and explain what happened to Soviet Jewry, has touched this important issue — the [Jewish] responsibility for the communism…. In Russia, the people’s anti2910В. Богуславский. В защиту Куняева // “22”, 1980. № 16, с. 169-174. 2911Ю. Штерн. Ситуация неустойчива… // “22”, 1984, № 38, с. 130. 2912В. Богуславский. В защиту Куняева // “22”, 1980. № 16. с. 175. 2913В.В. Шульгин. «Что нам в них не нравится…»: Об Антисемитизме в России. Париж, 1929, с.49-50.
Semitism is largely due to the fact that the Russians perceive the Jews as the cause of all the evil of the revolution. Yet American writers — Jews and exCommunists … do not want to resurrect the ghosts of the past. However, oblivion is a terrible thing.”2914 Simultaneously, another Jewish writer, an émigré from the Soviet Union, published: the experience of the Russian (Soviet) Jewry, in contrast to that of the European Jewry, whose historical background  “is the experience of a collision with the forces of outer evil … requires a look not from inside out but rather of introspection and … inner self-examination.” “In this reality we saw only one Jewish spirituality — that of the Commissar — and its name was Marxism.” Or he writes about “our young Zionists who demonstrate so much contempt toward Russia, her rudeness and savagery, contrasting all this with [the worthiness of] the ancient Jewish nation.” “I saw pretty clearly, that those who today sing hosanna to Jewry, glorifying it in its entiriety (without the slightest sense of guilt or the slightest potential to look inside), yesterday were saying: ‘I wouldn’t be against the Soviet regime, if it was not anti-Semitic,´ and two days ago they beat their breasts in ecstasy: `Long live the great brotherhood of nations! Eternal Glory to the Father and Friend, the genius Comrade Stalin! ´”2915 But today, when it is clear how many Jews were in the iron Bolshevik leadership, and how many more took part in the ideological guidance of a great country to the wrong track — should the question not arise [among modern Jews] as to some sense of responsibility for the actions of those [Jews]? It should be asked in general: shouldn’t there be a kind of moral responsibility — not a joint liability, yet the responsibility to remember and to acknowledge? For example, modern Germans accept liability to Jews directly, both morally and materially, as perpetrators are liable to the victims: for many years they have paid compensation to Israel and personal compensation to surviving victims. So what about Jews? When Mikhail Kheifets, whom I repeatedly cite in this work, after having been through labor camps, expressed the grandeur of his character by repenting on behalf of his people for the evil committed by the Jews in the Soviet Union in the name of communism — he was bitterly ridiculed. The whole educated society, the cultured circle, had genuinely failed to notice any Russian grievances in the 1920s and 1930s; they didn’t even assume that  such could exist — yet they instantly recognized the Jewish grievances as soon as those emerged. Take, for example, Victor Perelman, who after emigrating published an anti-Soviet Jewish journal Epoch and We and who served the regime in the filthiest place, in Chakovsky’s Literaturnaya Gazeta — until  the Jewish question had entered his life. Then he opted out….
2914Дан Левин. На краю соблазна: [Интервью] // “22”, 1978, № 1, с. 55. 2915А. Суконик. О религиозном и атеистическом сознании // Вестник Русского Христианского Движения. Париж-Нью-Йорк-Москва, 1977, № 123, с. 43-46.
At a higher level, they generalized it as “the crash of … illusions about the integration [of Jewry] into the Russian social movements, about making any change in Russia.”2916 Thus, as soon as the Jews recognized their explicit antagonism to the Soviet regime, they turned into its intellectual opposition — in accord to their social role. Of course, it was not them who rioted in Novocherkassk, or created unrest in Krasnodar, Alexandrov, Murom, or Kostroma. Yet the filmmaker Mikhail Romm plucked up his heart and, during a public speech, unambiguously denounced the “anti-cosmopolitan” campaign — and that became one of the first Samizdat documents (and Romm himself, who in so timely a manner rid himself of his ideological impediments, became a kind of spiritual leader for the Soviet Jewry, despite his films Lenin in October (1937), Lenin in 1918 (1939), and despite being a fivefold winner of the Stalin Prize). And after that the Jews had become reliable supporters and intrepid members of the “democratic” and “dissident” movements. Looking back from Israel at the din of Moscow, another witness reflected: “A large part of Russian democrats (if not the majority) are of Jewish origin…. Yet they do not identify [themselves] as Jews and do not realize that their audience is also mostly Jewish.”2917 And so the Jews had once again become the Russian revolutionaries, shouldering the social duty of the Russian intelligentsia, which the Jewish Bolsheviks so zealously helped to exterminate during the first decade after the revolution; they had become the true and genuine nucleus of the new public opposition. And so yet again no progressive movement was possible without Jews. Who had halted the torrent of false political (and often semi-closed) court trials? Alexander Ginzburg, and then Pavel Litvinov and Larisa Bogoraz did. I would not exaggerate if I claim that their appeal “To world public opinion” in January 1968, delivered not through unreliable Samizdat, but handed fearlessly to the West in front of Cheka cameras, had been a milestone of Soviet ideological history. Who were those seven brave souls who dragged their leaden feet to Lobnoye Mesto [a stone platform in Red Square] on Aug. 25, 1968? They did it not for the greater success of their protest, but to wash the name of Russia from the Czechoslovak disgrace by their sacrifice. Four out of the seven were Jews. (Remember, that the percentage of Jews in the population of the country then was less than 1%) We should also remember Semyon Gluzman, who sacrificed his freedom in the struggle against the “nuthouses” [dissidents were sometimes incarcerated in psychiatric clinics]. Many Jewish intellectuals from Moscow were among the first punished by the Soviet regime. Yet very few dissidents ever regretted the past of their Jewish fathers. P. Litvinov never mentioned his grandfather’s role in Soviet propaganda. Neither would we hear from V. Belotserkovsky how many innocents were slaughtered
2916Р. Нудельман. Оглянись в раздумье…: [Круглый стол] // “22 . 1982, № 24, с. 112. 2917А. Воронель. Будущее русской алии // “22”, 1978, № 2, с. 186.
by his Mauser-toting father. Communist Raisa Lert, who became a dissident late in life, was proud of her membership in that party even after The Gulag Archipelago; the party “she had joined in good faith and enthusiastically” in her youth; the party to which she had “wholly devoted herself” and from which she herself had suffered, yet nowadays it is ”not the same” party anymore.2918 Apparenty she did not realize how appealing the early Soviet terror was for her. After the events of 1968, Sakharov joined the dissident movement without a backward glance. Among his new dissident preoccupations were many individual cases; in particular, personal cases of Jewish refuseniks [those, overwhelming Jewish, dissidents who requested, but were refused the right to emigrate from the Soviet Union]. Yet when he tried to expand the business (as he had innocently confided to me, not realizing all the glaring significance of what he said), Gelfand, a member of the Academy of Science, told him that “we are tired of helping these people to resolve their problems,” while another member, Zeldovich, said: “I’m not going to sign any petition on behalf of victims of any injustice — I want to retain the ability to protect those who suffer for their nationality.” Which means — to protect the Jews only. There was also a purely Jewish dissident movement, which was concerned only with the oppression of the Jews and Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union (more about it — later).
A trasformation in public consciousness often pushes forward outstanding individuals as representatives, symbols and spokesmen of the age. So in the 1960s Alexander Galich became such a typical and accurate representative of the processes and attitudes in the Soviet intellectual circles. (“`Galich´ is a pen name, explains N. Rubinstein. It is made of syllables of his real name — Ginsburg Alexander Arkadievich. Choosing a pen name is a serious thing.”2919 Actually, I assume that the author was aware that, apart from being “just a combination of syllables,” “Galich” is also the name of the ancient Russian city from the very heart of Slavic history.) Galich enjoyed the general support of Soviet intelligentsia; tape recordings of his guitar performances were widely disseminated; and they have almost become the symbol of the social revival of the 1960s expressing it powerfully and vehemently. The opinion of the cultural circle was unanimous: “the most popular people’s poet,” the “bard of modern Russia.” Galich was 22 when the Soviet-German War broke out. He says that he was exempt from military service because of poor health; he then moved to Grozny, where he “unexpectedly easily became the head of the literature section of the 2918Р. Лерт. Поздний опыт // Синтаксис: Публицистика, критика, полемика. Париж, 1980, № 6, с. 5-6. 2919Н. Рубинштейн. Выключите магнитофон — поговорим о поэте // Время и мы (далее — ВМ): Международный журнал литературы и общественных проблем. Тель-Авив, 1975, № 2, с. 164.
local Drama Theatre”; he also “organized a theater of political satire”; then he evacuated through Krasnovodsk to Chirchik near Tashkent; in 1942, he moved from there to Moscow with a front-line theatrical company under formation and spent the rest of the war with that company. He recalled how he worked on hospital trains, composing and performing couplets for wounded soldiers; how they were drinking spirits with a trainmaster…. “All of us, each in his own way, worked for the great common cause: we were defending our Motherland.”2920 After the war he became a wellknown Soviet scriptwriter (he worked on many movies) and a playwright (ten of his plays were staged by “many theaters in the Soviet Union and abroad” [216] [references in square brackets refer to the page number in the source 21]. All that was in 1940s and 1950s, in the age of general spiritual stagnation — well, he could not step out of the line, could he? He even made a movie about Chekists, and was awarded for his work. Yet in the early 1960s, Galich abruptly changed his life. He found courage to forsake his successful and well-off life and “walk into the square.” [98] It was after that that he began performing guitar-accompanied songs to people gathering in private Moscow apartments. He gave up open publishing, though it was, of course, not easy: “[it was great] to read a name on the cover, not just someone else’s, but mine!” [216] Surely, his anti-regime songs, keen, acidic, and and morally demanding, were of benefit to the society, further destabilizing public attitudes. In his songs he mainly addressed Stalin’s later years and beyond; he usually did not deplore the radiant past of the age of Lenin (except one instance: “The carts with bloody cargo / squeak by Nikitsky Gate” [224]). At his best, he calls the society to moral cleansing, to resistance (“Gold-digger’s waltz” [26], “I choose liberty” [226], “Ballad of the clean hands” [181], “Our fingers blotted from the questionnaires” [90], “Every day silent trumpets glorify thoughtful vacuity” [92]). Sometimes he sang the hard truth about the past (“In vain had our infantry perished in 1943, to no avail” [21]), sometimes — “Red myths,” singing about poor persecuted communists (“There was a time — almost a third of the inmates came from the Central Committee, / There was a time when for the red color / they added ten years [to the sentence]!”[69]). Once he touched dekulakization (“Disenfranchised ones were summoned in first” [115]). Yet his main blow was against the current establishment (“There are fences in the country; behind fences live the leaders” [13]). He was justly harsh there; however, he oversimplified the charge by attacking their privileged way of life only: here they eat, drink, rejoice [151-152]. The songs were embittering, but in a narrow-minded way, almost like the primitive “Red proletarian” propaganda of the past. Yet when he was switching his focus from the leaders to “the
2920Александр Галич. Песни. Стихи. Поэмы. Киноповесть. Пьеса. Статьи. Екатеринбург: У-Фактория, 1998 (далее — Галич), с. 552, 556, 561-562. Страницы в тексте в квадратных скобка; Указаны также по этому изданию.
people”, his characters were almost entirely boobies, fastidious men, rabble and rascals — a very limited selection. He had found a precise point of perspective for himself, perfectly in accord with the spirit of the time: he impersonalized himself with all those people who were suffering, persecuted and killed (“I was a GI and as a GI I’ll die” [248], “We, GIs, are dying in battle”). Yet with his many songs narrated from the first person of a former camp inmate, he made a strong impression that he was an inmate himself (“And that other inmate was me myself” [87]; “I froze like a horseshoe in a sleigh trail / Into ice that I picked with a hammer pick / After all, wasn’t it me who spent twenty years / In those camps” [24]; “as the numbers [personal inmate number tattooed on the arm] / we died, we died”; “from the camp we were sent right to the front!”[69]). Many believed that he was a former camp inmate and “they have tried to find from Galich when and where he had been in camps.”2921 So how did he address his past, his longstanding participation in the stupefying official Soviet lies? That’s what had struck me the most: singing with such accusatory pathos, he had never expressed a single word of his personal remorse, not a word of personal repentance, nowhere! Didn’t he realize that when he sang: “Oh Party’s Iliad! What a giftwrapped groveling!” [216], he sang about himself? And when he crooned: “If you sell the unction” [40], as though referring to somebody else, did it occur to him that he himself was “selling unction” for half of his life. Why on earth would he not renounce his proofficial plays and films? No! “We did not sing glory to executioners!” [119] Yet, as the matter of fact, they did. Perhaps he did realize it or he gradually came to the realization, because later, no longer in Russia, he said: “I was a well-off screenwriter and playwright and a well-off Soviet flunky. And I have realized that I could no longer go on like that. Finally, I have to speak loudly, speak the truth …” [639]. But then, in the sixties, he intrepidly turned the pathos of the civil rage, for instance, to the refutation of the Gospel commandments (“do not judge, lest ye be judged”): “No, I have contempt for the very essence / Of this formula of existence!” And then, relying on the sung miseries, he confidently tried on  a prosecutor’s robe: “I was not elected. But I am the judge!” [100] And so he grew so confident, that in the lengthy Poem about Stalin (The Legend of Christmas), where he in bad taste imagined Stalin as Christ, and presented the key formula of his agnostic mindset — his really famous, the clichéd -quotes, and so harmful lines: “Don’t be afraid of fire and hell, / And fear only him / Who says: `I know the right way!´” [325]. But Christ did teach us the right way…. What we see here in Galich’s words is just boundless intellectual anarchism that muzzles any clear idea, any resolute offer. Well, we can always run as a thoughtless (but pluralistic) herd, and probably we’ll get somewhere.
2921В. Волин. Он вышел на площадь // Галич, с. 632.
Yet the most heartrending and ubiquitous keynote in his lyrics was the sense of Jewish identity and Jewish pain (“Our train leaves for Auschwitz today and daily”). Other good examples include the poems By the rivers of Babylon and Kadish. (Or take this: “My six-pointed star, burn it on my sleeve and on my chest.” Similar lyrical and passionate tones can be found in the The memory of Odessa (“I wanted to unite Mandelstam and Chagall). “Your kinsman and your cast-off / Your last singer of the Exodus” — as he addressed the departing Jews.) The Jewish memory imbued him so deeply that even in his non-Jewish lyrics he casually added expressions such as: “Not a hook-nosed”; “not a Tatar, not a Yid” [115, 117]”; “you are still not in Israel, dodderer?” [294]; and even Arina Rodionovna [Pushkin’s nanny, immortalized by the poet in his works] lulls him in Yiddish [101]. Yet he doesn’t mention a single prosperous or nonoppressed Jew, a well-off Jew on a good position, for instance, in a research institute, editorial board, or in commerce — such characters didn’t even make a passing appearance in his poems. A Jew is always either humiliated, or suffering, or imprisoned and dying in a camp. Take his famous lines: “You are not to be chamberlains, the Jews … / Neither the Synod, nor the Senate is for you / You belong in Solovki and Butyrki” [the latter two being political prisons] [40]. What a short memory they have — not only Galich, but his whole audience who were sincerely, heartily taking in these sentimental lines! What about those twenty years, when Soviet Jewry was not nearly in the Solovki, when so many of them did parade as chamberlains and in the Senate!? They have forgotten it. They have sincerely and completely forgotten it. Indeed, it is so difficult to remember bad things about yourself. And inasmuch as among the successful people milking the regime there were supposedly no Jews left, but only Russians, Galich’s satire, unconsciously or consciously, hit the Russians, all those Klim Petroviches and Paramonovs; all that social anger invoked by his songs targeted them, through the stressed ”russopyaty” [derogatory term for Russians] images and details, presenting them as informers, prison guards, profligates, fools or drunks. Sometimes it was more like a caricature, sometimes more of a contemptuous pity (which we often indeed deserve, unfortunately): “Greasy long hair hanging down, / The guest started “Yermak” [a song about the cossack leader and Russian folk hero] … he cackles like a cock  / Enough to make a preacher swear / And he wants to chat / About the salvation of Russia” [117-118]. Thus he pictured the Russians as always drunk, not distinguishing kerosene from vodka, not interested in anything except drinking, idle, or simply lost, or foolish individuals.Yet he was considered a folk poet…. And he didn’t image a single Russian hero-soldier, workman, or intellectual, not even a single decent camp inmate (he assigned the role of the main camp inmate to himself), because, you know, all those “prisonguard seed” [118] camp bosses are Russians. And here he wrote about Russia directly: “Every liar is a Messiah! / <…> And just dare you to ask — / Brothers,
had there even been / Any Rus in Russia?” — “It is abrim with filth.” — And then, desperately: “But somewhere, perhaps, / She does exist!?” That invisible Russia, where “under the tender skies / Everyone shares / God’s word and bread.” “I pray thee: / Hold on! / Be alive in decay, / So in the heart, as in Kitezh, / I could hear your bells!” [280-281] So, with the new opportunity and the lure of emigration, Galich was torn between the submerged legendary Kitezh [legendary Russian invisble city] and today’s filth: “It’s the same vicious circle, the same old story, the ring, which cannot be either closed, or open!” [599]. He left with the words: “I, a Russian poet, cannot be separated from Russia by `the fifth article´ [the requirement in the Soviet internal passport – “nationality”]!” [588] Yet some other departing Jews drew from his songs a seed of aversion and contempt for Russia, or at least, the confidence that it is right to break away from her. Heed a voice from Israel: “We said goodbye to Russia. Not without pain, but forever…. Russia still holds us tenaciously. But … in a year, ten years, a hundred years — we’ll escape from her and find our own home. Listening to Galich, we once again recognize that it is the right way.”2922
2922Н. Рубинштейн. Выключите магнитофон — поговорим о поэте // ВМ, Тель-Авив, 1975, № 2, с. 177.
Chapter 25. Accusing Russia
The Jewish break from the Soviet communism was doubtless a movement of historical significance. In the 1920s and 1930s, the fusion of the Soviet Jewry and Bolshevism seemed permanent. Then suddenly, they diverge? What a joy! Of course, as is always true for both individuals and nations, it is unreasonable to expect words of remorse from Jews regarding their past involvement. But I absolutely could not expect that the Jews, while deserting Bolshevism, rather than expressing even a sign of repentance or at least some embarrassment, instead angrily turned on the Russian people: it is the Russians who had ruined democracy in Russia (i.e., in February 1917), it is the Russians who are guilty of support of this regime from 1918 on. Sure, they claim, it is we (the Russian people) who are the guilty! Actually, it was earlier than 1918 – the dirty scenes of the radiant February Revolution were tale-telling. Yet the neophyte anti-communists were uncompromising – from now on everyone must accept that they have always fought against this regime, and no one should recall that it used to be their favorite and should not mention how well they had once served this tyranny. Because it was the “natives” who created, nurtured and cared for it: “The leaders of the October Coup … were the followers rather than the leaders. [Really? The New Iron Party was made up of the “followers”?] They simply voiced the dormant wishes of the masses and worked to implement them. They did not break with the grassroots.” “The October coup was a disaster for Russia. The country could evolve differently…. Then [in the stormy anarchy of the February Revolution] Russia saw the  signs of law, freedom and respect for human dignity by the state, but they all were swept away by the people’s wrath.”2923 Here is a more recent dazzling treatment of Jewish participation in Bolshevism: “The Bolshevism of Lenin and Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Bolsheviks was just an intellectual and civilized form of ‘plebian’ Bolshevism. Should the former fail, the latter, much more dreadful, would prevail.” Therefore, “by widely participating in the Bolshevik Revolution, providing it with cadres of intellectuals and organizers, the Jews saved Russia from total mob rule. They came out with the most humane of 2923B. Shragin. Protivostoyanie dukha [Standoff of the Spirit (hereinafter — B. Shragin)]. London: Overseas Publications, 1977, p. 160, 188-189.
possible forms of Bolshevism.”2924 Alas, “just as the rebellious people had used the Party of Lenin to overthrow the democracy of intellectuals [when did that exist?], the pacified people used Stalin’s bureaucracy to get rid of … everything still harboring free intellectual spirit.”2925 Sure, sure: “the guilt of the intelligentsia for the subsequent dismal events of Russian history is greatly exaggerated.” And in the first place, “the intelligentsia is liable to itself,”2926 and by no means to the people. On the contrary, “it would be nice if the people realized their guilt before the intelligentsia.”2927 Indeed, “the totalitarian rule … in its essence and origin is that of the people.”2928 “This is a totalitarian country … because such was the choice of Russian people.”2929 It is all because the “Tatar’s wild spirit captured the soul of Orthodox Russia,”2930 that is, the “Asian social and spiritual structure, inherited by the Russians from the Mongols … is stagnant and incapable of development and progress.”2931 (Well, Lev Gumilev also developed a theory that instead of the Tatar yoke, there was a friendly alliance of Russians and Tatars. However, Russian folklore, in its many proverbs referring to Tatars as to enemies and oppressors, provided an unambiguous answer to that question. Folklore does not lie; it is not pliant like a scientific theory.) Therefore, “the October coup was an unprecedented breakthrough of the Asian essence [of Russians].”2932 For those who want to tear and trample Russian history, Chaadayev is the favorite theoretician (although he is undoubtedly an outstanding thinker). First Samizdat and later émigré publications carefully selected and passionately quoted his published and unpublished texts which suited their purposes. As to the unsuitable quotations and to the fact that the main opponents of Chaadayev among his contemporaries were not Nicholas I and Benckendorff, but his 2924Nik. Shulgin. Novoe russkoe samosoznanie [The New Russian Mind]. // Vek 20 i mir [The 20th Century and the World]. Moscow, 1990, (3), p. 27. 2925M. Meyerson-Aksenov. Rozhdeniye novoi intelligentsii [The Birth of New Intelligentsia]. // Samosoznanie: Sb. statei. [Self-consciousness: The Collection of Articles]. New York: Chronicles, 1976, p. 102. 2926B. Shragin, p, 246, 249. 2927O. Altaev. Dvoinoe soznanie intelligentsii i psevdo-kultura [Dual Mind of Intelligentsia and Pseudo-Culture]. // Vestnik Russkogo Studencheskogo Khristianskogo Dvizheniya [Herald of Russian Student Christian Movement]. Paris – New York, 1970, (97), p. 11. 2928M. Meyerson-Aksenov. Rozhdeniye novoi intelligentsii [The Birth of New Intelligentsia]. // Samosoznanie: Sb. statei. [Self-consciousness: The Collection of Articles]. New York: Chronicles, 1976, p. 102. 2929Beni Peled. My ne smozhem zhdat escho dve tysyachi let! [We cannot wait for another two thousand years!]. [Interview] // “22”: Obshchestvenno-politicheskiy i literaturniy zhurnal evreyskoy intelligentsii iz SSSR v Izraile [Social, Political and Literary Journal of the Jewish Intelligentsia from the USSR in Israel]. Tel-Aviv, 1981, (17), p. 114. 2930N. Prat. Emigrantskie kompleksy v istoricheskom aspekte [Emigrant’s Fixations in the Historical Perspective]. // Vremya i my: Mezhdunarodny zhurnal literatury i obshchestvennykh problem [Epoch and We (hereinafter – EW): International Journal of Literature and Social Problems]. New York, 1980, (56), p. 191. 2931B. Shragin, p, 304. 2932Ibid., p. 305
friends – Pushkin, Vyazemsky, Karamzin, and Yazikov – these facts were ignored. In the early 1970s, the hate against all things Russian was gathering steam. Derogatory expressions about Russian culture entered Samizdat and contemporary slang. “Human pigsty” – so much contempt for Russia as being spoiled material was expressed in the anonymous Samizdat article signed by “S. Telegin” (G. Kopylov)! Regarding the forest fires of 1972, the same “Telegin” cursed Russia in a Samizdat leaflet: “So, the Russian forests burn? It serves Russia right for all her evil-doing!! “The entire people consolidate into the reactionary mass” (G. Pomerants). Take another sincere confession: “The sound of an accordion [the popular Russian national instrument] drives me berserk; the very contact with these masses irritates me.”2933 Indeed, love cannot be forced. “‘Jews,’‘Jewish destiny’ is just the rehash of the destiny of intelligentsia in this country, the destiny of her culture; the Jewish orphanage symbolizes loneliness because of the collapse of the traditional faith in ‘the people.’”2934 (What a transformation happened between the 19th and mid-20th century with the eternal Russian problem of “the people”! By now  they view “the people” as an indigenous mass, apathetically satisfied with its existence and its leaders. And by the inscrutable providence of Fate, the Jews were forced to live and suffer in the cities of their country. To love these masses is impossible; to care about them – unnatural.) The same Khazanov (by then still in the USSR) reasoned: The Russia which I love is a Platonic idea that does not exist in reality. The Russia which I see around is abhorrent”; “she is a unique kind of Augean stables”; “her mangy inhabitants”; “there’ll be a day of shattering reckoning for all she is today.”2935 Indeed, there will be a day of reckoning, though not for the state of adversity that had fallen on Russia much earlier.
In the 1960s, many among intelligentsia began to think and talk about the situation in the USSR, about its future and about Russia itself. Due to strict government censorship these arguments and ideas were mentioned only in private or in mostly pseudonymous Samizdat articles. But when Jewish emigration began, the criticisms of Russia openly and venomously spilled across the free Western world, as it formed one of the favorite topics among the émigrés and was voiced so loudly that often nothing else could be heard. In 1968, Arkady Belinkov fled abroad. He was supposedly a fierce enemy of the Soviet regime and not at all of the Russian people. Wasn’t he? Well, consider his article The Land of Slaves, the Land of Masters in The New Bell, a
2933M. Deich.  Zapiski postoronnego [Commentaries of an Outsider]. // “22”, 1982, (26), p. 156. 2934B. Khazanov. Novaya Rossiya [new Russia]. // EW, Tel-Aviv, 1976, (8), p. 143. 2935Ibid., p. 141, 142, 144.
collection he edited himself. And at what did he direct his wrath? (It is worth considering that the article was written back in the USSR and the author did not have enough courage to accuse the regime itself.) Belinkov does not use the word “Soviet” even once, instead preferring  a familiar theme: eternally enslaved Russia, freedom “for our homeland is worse than gobbling broken glass” and in Russia “they sometimes hang the wrong people, sometimes the wrong way, and never enough.” Even in the 1820s “it was much evident that in the process of evolution, the population of [Russia] …would turn into a herd of traitors, informers, and torturers”; “it was the “Russian fear” – to prepare warm clothes and to wait for a knock at the door” – note that even here it was not the “Soviet fear.” (Yet who before the Bolshevik revolution had ever waited for a knock on the door in the middle of the night?) “The court in Russia does not judge, it already knows everything. Therefore, in Russia, it only condemns.”2936 (Was it like that even during the Alexandrine reforms?…. And what about juries and magistrates? Hardly a responsible, balanced judgment!) Indeed, so overwhelming is the author’s hate and so bitter his bile that he vilifies such great Russian writers as Karamzin, Zhukovsky, Tyutchev and even Pushkin, not to mention Russian society in general for its insufficient revolutionary spirit: “a pathetic society of slaves, descendants of slaves and ancestors of slaves,” “the cattle trembling from fear and anger,” “rectum-pipers, shuddering at the thought of possible consequences,” “the Russian intelligentsia always been willing to help stifle freedom.”2937 Well, if, for Belinkov, it was all “masked anti-Soviet sentiments,” a sly wink, then why did he not rewrite it abroad? If Belinkov actually thought differently, then why print it in this form? No, that is the way he thought and what he hated. So was this how dissident Jews repudiated Bolshevism? Around the same time, at the end of the 1960s, a Jewish collection about the USSR was published in London. It included a letter from the USSR: “In the depths of the inner labyrinths of the Russian soul, there is always a pogromist…. A slave and a thug dwell there too.”2938 Belotserkovsky happily repeats someone else’s joke: “the Russians are a strong nation, except for their heads.”2939 “Let all these Russians, Ukrainians … growl drunkenly with their wives, gobble vodka and get happily misled by communist lies … without us … They were crawling on all fours worshipping wood and stone when we gave them the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.”2940
2936A. Belinkov. Strana rabov, strana gospod [The land of slaves, the land of masters]. // The New Bell: The Collection of Literary and Opinion Writings. London, 1972, p. 323, 339, 346, 350. 2937Ibid., p. 325-328, 337, 347, 355. 2938N. Shapiro. Slovo ryadovogo sovetskogo evreya [The Word of an Ordinary Soviet Jew]. // The Russian Anti-Semitism and Jews. Collection of essays. London, 1968, p. 50-51. 2939The New American, New York, 1982, March 23-29, (110), p. 11. 2940Jakob Yakir. Ya pishu Viktoru Krasinu [I Write to Viktor Krasin]. // Our Country, Tel Aviv, 1973, December 12. Cited from the New Journal, 1974, (117), p. 190.
“Oh, if only you would have held your peace! This would have been regarded as your wisdom.” (Job 13:5). (Let us note that any insulting judgment about the “Russian soul” in general or about the “Russian character” generally does not give rise to the slightest protest or doubt among civilized people. The question “of daring to judge nations as one uniform and faceless whole” does not arise. If someone does not like all things Russian or feels contempt for them, or even expresses in progressive circles the belief that “Russia is a cesspool,” this is no sin in Russia and it does not appear reactionary or backward. And no one immediately appeals to presidents, prime ministers, senators, or members of Congress with a reverent cry, “What do you think of such incitement of ethnic hatred?” We’ve said worse of ourselves since the 19th century and right up to the revolution. We have a rich tradition of this.) Then we learn of “semi-literate preachers of their religion,” and that “Russian Orthodoxy hasn’t earned the credence of intellectuals” (from “Telegin”). The Russians “so easily abandoned the faith of their forefathers, indifferently watched how their temples were destroyed in front of their eyes.” Oh, here is a guess: “Perhaps, the Russian people only temporarily submitted to the power of Christianity?” That is for 950 years! “And they only waited for the moment to get rid of it,”2941 that is, for the revolution? How much ill will must accumulate in someone’s heart to utter something like that! (Even Russian publicists often slipped into this trap of distorted consciousness. The eminent early emigrant journalist S. Rafalsky, perhaps even a priest’s son, wrote that “Orthodox Holy Russia allowed its holy sites to be easily crushed.”2942 Of course, the groans of those mowed down by Chekists’ machine guns during Church riots in 1918 were not heard in Paris. There have been no uprisings since. I would like to have seen this priest’s son try to save the sacred sites in the 1920s himself.) Sometimes it is stated bluntly: “Russian Orthodoxy is a Hottentot religion” (Grobman). Or, “idiocy perfumed by Rublev, Dionysius and Berdyaev”; the idea of the “restoration” of traditional Russian historical orthodoxy “scares many…. This is the darkest future possible for the country and for Christianity.”2943 Or, as novelist F. Gorenshtein said: “Jesus Christ was the Honorary Chairman of the Union of the Russian People [pre-revolutionary Russian Nationalist organization], whom they perceived as a kind of universal ataman [Cossack chieftain].”2944 Don’t make it too sharp – you might chip the blade! However, one must distinguish from such open rudeness that velvet soft Samizdat philosopher-essayist Grigory Pomerants who worked in those years. 2941Amram. Reaktsiya ottorzheniya [The Reaction of Rejection]. // “22”, 1979, (5), p. 201. 2942The New Russian Word, New York, 1975, November 30, p. 3. 2943M. Ortov. Pravoslavnoe gosudarstvo I tserkov [The orthodox State and the Church]. The Way: The Orthodox Almanac. New York, 1984, May-June, (3), p. 12, 15. 2944F. Gorenshtein. Shestoi konets krasnoi zvezdy [The Sixs Point of the Red Star]. // EW, New York, 1982, (65), p. 125.
Presumably, he rose above all controversies – he wrote about the fates of nations in general, about the fate of the intelligentsia generally; he suggested that nowadays no such thing as people exists, save, perhaps, Bushmen. I read him in 1960s Samizdat saying: “The people are becoming more and more vapid broth and only we, the intelligentsia, remain the salt of the earth.” “Solidarity of the intelligentsia across the borders is a more real thing than the solidarity of the intelligentsia and its people.” It sounded very modern and wise. And yet, in Czechoslovakia in 1968 it was precisely the unity of the intelligentsia with the “vapid broth” of its nonexistent people that created a spiritual stronghold long unheard of in Europe. The presence of two-thirds of a million Soviet troops couldn’t break their spirit; it was their communist leaders who eventually gave in. (And 12 years later, the same thing happened in Poland.) In his typically ambiguous manner of constructing endless parallel arguments that never merge into a clear logical construct, Pomerants never explicitly addressed the national question. He extensively dwelt on the Diaspora question, in the most abstract and general manner, not specifying any nation, hovering aloft in relativism and agnosticism. He glorified the Diaspora: “Everywhere, we are not exactly strangers. Everywhere, we are not exactly natives.”… “An appeal to one faith, tradition and nation flies in the face of another.”  He complained: “According to the rules established for the Warsaw students, one can love only one nation” but “what if I am related by blood to this country, but love others as well?”2945 This is a sophisticated bait-and-switch. Of course, you can love not only one, but ten or more countries and nations. However, you can belong to and be a son of only one motherland, just as you can only have one mother. To make the subject clearer, I want to describe the letter exchange I had with the Pomerants couple in 1967. By that year, my banned novel The First Circle circulated among the Samizdat – and among the first who had sent me their objections were G. S.  Pomerants and his wife, Z. A. Mirkin. They said that I hurt them by my inept and faulty handling of the Jewish question, and that I had irreparably damaged the image of Jews in the novel – and thus my own image.  How did I damage it? I thought I had managed to avoid showing those cruel Jews who reached the heights of power during the early Soviet years. But Pomerants’ letters abounded with undertones and nuances, and they accused me of insensitivity to Jewish pain. I replied to them, and they replied to me. In these letters we also discussed the right to judge entire nations, even though I had done no such thing in my novel. Pomerants suggested to me then – and to every writer in general as well as to anyone who offers any personal, psychological or social judgment – to behave and to reason as if no nation has ever existed in the world – not only to
2945G. Pomerants. Chelovek niotkuda [The Man from Nowhere]. From G. Pomerants, Unpublished. Frankfurt, Posev, 1972, p. 143, 145, 161-162.
abstain from judging them as a whole but to ignore every man’s nationality. “What is natural and excusable for Ivan Denisovich (to see Cesar Markovich as a non-Russian) – is a disgrace for an intellectual, and for a Christian (not a baptized person but a Christian) is a great sin: ‘There is no Hellene and no Jew for me.’” What an elevated point of view. May God help us all reach it one day. After all, without it, would not the meaning of united humanity, and so Christinaity, have been useless? Yet we have already been aggressively convinced once that there are no nations, and were instructed to quickly destroy our own, and we madly did it back then. In addition, regardless of the argument, how can we portray specific people without referring to their nationality? And if there are no nations, are there no languages? But no writer can write in any language other than his native one. If nations would wither away, languages would die also. One cannot eat from an empty bowl. I noticed that it was more often Jews than any others who insisted that we pay no attention to nationality! What does “nationality” have to do with anything? What “national characteristics,” what “national character” are you talking about? And I was ready to shake hands on that: “I agree! Let’s ignore it from now on….” But we live in our unfortunate century, when perhaps the first feature people notice in others for some reason is exactly their nationality. And, I swear, Jews are the ones who distinguish and closely monitor it most jealously and carefully. Their own nation…. Then, what should we do with the fact – you have read about it above – that Jews so often judge Russians precisely in generalized terms, and almost always to condemn? The same Pomerants writes about “the pathological features of the Russian character,” including their “internal instability.” (And he is not concerned that he judges the entire nation. Imagine if someone spoke of “pathological features of the Jewish character”… What would happen then?) The Russian “masses allowed all the horrors of Oprichnina to happen just as they later allowed Stalin’s death camps.”2946 (See, the Soviet internationalist bureaucratic elite would have stopped them – if not for this dull mass….) More sharply still, “Russian Nationalism will inevitably end in an aggressive pogrom,”2947 meaning that every Russian who loves his nation already has the potential for being pogromist. We can but repeat the words of that Chekhov’s character: “Too early!” Most remarkable was how Pomerants’s second letter to me ended. Despite his previously having so insistently demanded that it is not proper to distinguish
2946G. Pomerants. Sny zemli [Nightdreams of Earth]. // “22”, 1980, (12), p. 129. 2947G. Pomerants. Chelovek niotkuda [The Man from Nowhere]. From G. Pomerants, Unpublished. Frankfurt, Posev, 1972, p. 157.
between nations, in that large and emotionally charged letter, (written in a very angry, heavy hand), he delivered an ultimatum on how I could still save my disgusting The First Circle. The offered remedy was this: to turn Gerasimovich [the hero] into a Jew! So a Jew would commit the novel’s greatest act of spiritual heroism! “It is absolutely not important that Gerasimovich had been drawn from a Russian prototype,” says our indifferent-to-nations author (italics added). In truth, he did give me an alternative: if I still insisted on leaving Gerasimovich Russian, then I must add an equally powerful image of a noble, self-sacrificing Jew to my story. And if I would not follow any of his advice, Pomerants threatened to open a public campaign against me. (I ignored it at this point.) Notably, he conducted this one-sided battle, calling it “our polemic,” first in foreign journals and, when it became possible, in the Soviet magazines, often repeating and reprinting the same articles, although taking care each time to exorcise the blemishes his critics had picked up the last time. In the course of this he uttered another pearl of wisdom: there was only one Absolute Evil in the world and it was Hitlerism – in this regard, our philosopher was not a relativist, not at all. But as to communism, this former prisoner of the camps and by no means a Communist himself, suddenly proclaims that communism – is not an unquestionable evil (and even “some spirit of democracy surrounded the early Cheka”), and he does so harder and harder over the years  (reacting to my intransigence towards communism).2948 On the other hand, hard core anticommunism is undoubtedly evil, especially if it builds upon the Russian Nationalism (which, as he had reminded us earlier, cannot be separated from pogroms). That is where Pomerants’s smooth high-minded and “non-national” principles led. Given such a skewed bias, can mutual understanding between Russians and Jews be achieved? “You mark the speck in your brother’s eye, but ignore the plank in your own.” In those same months when I corresponded with Pomerants, some liberal hand in the Leningrad Regional Party Committee copied a secret memorandum signed by Shcherbakov, Smirnov, and Utekhin on the matter of alleged “destructive Zionist activity in the city” with “subtle forms of ideological subversion.” My Jewish friends asked me “How should we deal with this?” “It is clear, how,” – I replied before even reading the paper – “Openness! Publish it in Samizdat! Our strength is transparency and publicity!” But my friends hesitated: “We cannot do it just like that because it would be misunderstood.” After reading the documents, I understood their anxiety. From the reports, it was clear that the youth’s literary evening at the Writers’ House on January 30, 1968 had been politically honest and brave – the government with its politics
2948G. Pomerants. Son o spravedlivom vozmezdii [A Dream about Recompense]. // Syntaksis: Journalism, Critique, Polemic. Paris, 1980, (6), p. 21.
and ideology had been both openly and covertly ridiculed. On the other hand, the speeches had clear national emphases (perhaps, the youth there were mostly Jewish); they contained explicit resentment and hostility, and even, perhaps, contempt for Russians, and longing for Jewish spirituality. It was because of this that my friends were wary of publishing the document in Samizdat. I was suddenly struck by how true these Jewish sentiments were. “Russia is reflected in the window glass of a beer stand,” – the poet Ufland had supposedly said there. How horrifyingly true! It seemed that the speakers accused the Russians, not directly, but by allusions, of crawling under counters of beer pubs and of being dragged from the mud by their wives; that they drink vodka until unconscious, they squabble and steal…. We must see ourselves objectively, see our fatal shortcomings. Suddenly, I grasped the Jewish point of view; I looked around and I was horrified as well: Dear God, where we, the Jews? Cards, dominoes, gaping at TV…. What cattle, what animals surround us! They have neither God nor spiritual interests. And so much feeling of hurt from past oppression rises in your soul. Only it is forgotten, that the real Russians were killed, slaughtered and suppressed, and the rest were stupefied, embittered, and driven to the extremes by Bolshevik thugs and not without the zealous participation of the fathers of today’s young Jewish intellectuals. Modern day Jews are irritated by those mugs who have become the Soviet leadership since the 1940s – but they irritate us as well. However, the best among us were killed, not spared. “Do not look back!” – Pomerants lectured us later in his Samizdat essays; do not look back like Orpheus who lost Eurydice this way. Yet we have already lost more than Eurydice. We were taught since the 1920s to throw away the past and jump on board modernity. But the old Russian proverb advises – go ahead but always look back. We must look back. Otherwise, we would never understand anything.
Even if we had tried not to look back, we would always be reminded that the “core [Russian issue] is in fact the inferiority complex of the spiritless leaders of the people that has persisted throughout its long history,” and this very complex “pushed the Russian Tsarist government towards military conquests…. An inferiority complex is disease of mediocrity.”2949 Do you want to know why the Revolution of 1917 happened in Russia? Can you guess? Yes, “the same inferiority complex caused a revolution in Russia.”2950 (Oh, immortal Freud, is there nothing he hasn’t explained?)
2949L. Frank. Eshche raz o “russkom voprose” [The “Russian Question” Once Again]. // Russkaya mysl [The Russian Thinker], 1989, May 19, p. 13. 2950Amrozh. Sovetskii antisemitism – prichiny i prognozy [Soviet Anti-Semitism: Causes and Prospects]. Seminar. // “22”, 1978, (3), p. 153.
They even stated that “Russian socialism was a direct heir of Russian autocracy”2951 – precisely a direct one, it goes without saying. And, almost in unison, “there is direct continuity between the Tsarist government and communism … there is qualitative similarity.”2952 What else could you expect from “Russian history, founded on blood and provocations?”2953 In a review of Agursky’s interesting book, Ideology of National Bolshevism, we find that “in reality, traditional, fundamental ideas of the Russian national consciousness began to penetrate into the practice and ideology of the ruling party very early”; “the party ideology was transformed as early as the mid-1920s.” Really? Already in the mid-1920s? How come we missed it at the time? Wasn’t it the same mid-1920s when the very words “Russian,” “I am Russian” had been considered counter-revolutionary? I remember it well. But, you see, even back then, in the midst of persecution against all that was Russian and Orthodox, the party ideology “began in practice to be persistently guided by the national idea”; “outwardly preserving its internationalist disguise, Soviet authorities actually engaged in the consolidation of the Russian state.”2954 Of course! “Contrary to its internationalist declarations, the revolution in Russia has remained a national affair.”2955 This “Russia, upturned by revolution, continued to build the people’s state.”2956 People’s state? How dare they say that, knowing of the Red Terror, of the millions of peasants killed during collectivization, and of the insatiable Gulag? No, Russia is irrevocably condemned for all her history and in all her forms. Russia is always under suspicion, the “Russian idea” without antiSemitism “seems to be no longer an idea and not even the Russian one.” Indeed, “hostility towards culture is a specific Russian phenomenon”; “how many times have we heard that they are supposedly the only ones in the whole world who have preserved purity and chastity, respecting God in the middle of their native wilderness”;2957 “the greatest soulful sincerity has supposedly found shelter in this crippled land. This soulful sincerity is being presented to us as a kind of national treasure, a unique product like caviar.”2958 Yes, make fun of us Russians; it is for our own good. Unfortunately, there is some truth to these words. But, while expressing them, do not lapse into such hatred. Having long been aware of the terrifying decline of our nation under the communists, it was precisely during those 1970s that we gingerly wrote about a 2951V. Gusman. Perestroika: mify i realnost [Perestroika: Myths and the Reality]. // “22”, 1990, (70), p. 139, 142. 2952B. Shragin, p, 99. 2953M. Amusin. Peterburgskie strasti [Passions of St. Petersburg]. // “22”, 1995, (96), p. 191. 2954I. Serman. Review. // “22”, 1982, (26), p. 210-212. 2955B. Shragin, p, 158. 2956M. Meyerson-Aksenov. Rozhdeniye novoi intelligentsii [The Birth of New Intelligentsia]. // Samosoznanie: Sb. statei. [Self-consciousness: The Collection of Articles] New York: Chronicles, 1976, p. 102. 2957B. Khazanov. Pisma bez stempelya [The Letters without Postmark]. // EW, New York, 1982, (69), p. 156, 158, 163. 2958B. Khazanov. Novaya Rossiya [New Russia]. // EW, Tel Aviv, 1976, (8), p. 142.
hope of revival of our morals and culture. But strangely enough, the contemporary Jewish authors attacked the idea of Russian revival with a relentless fury, as if (or because?) they feared that Soviet culture would be replaced by the Russian one. “I am afraid that the new ‘dawn’ of this doomed country would be even more repugnant than its current [1970-1980s] decline.”2959 Looking back from the “democratic” 1990s, we can agree that it was a prophetic declaration. Still, was it said with compassion or with malice? And here is even more: “Beware, when someone tells you to love your homeland: such love is charged with hatred…. Beware of stories that tell you that in Russia, Russians are the worst off, that Russians suffered the most, and that the Russian population is dwindling“ – sure, as we all know, this is a lie! “Be careful when someone tells you about that great statesman … who was assassinated” (i.e., Stolypin) – is that also a deception? No, it is not a deception: “Not because the facts are incorrect” – nevertheless, do not accept even these true facts: “Be careful, be aware!”2960 There is something extraordinary in this stream of passionate accusations. Who would have guessed during the fiery 1920s that after the enfeeblement and downfall of that “beautiful” (i.e., Communist) regime in Russia, those Jews, who themselves had suffered much from communism, who seemingly cursed it and ran away from it, would curse and kick not communism, but Russia itself – blast her from Israel and from Europe, and from across the ocean!? There are so many, such confident voices ready to judge Russia’s many crimes and failings, her inexhaustible guilt towards the Jews – and they so sincerely believe this guilt to be inexhaustible – almost all of them believe it! Meanwhile, their own people are coyly cleared of any responsibility for their participation in Cheka shootings, for sinking the barges and their doomed human cargo in the White and Caspian seas, for their role in collectivization, the Ukrainian famine and in all the abominations of the Soviet administration, for their talented zeal in brainwashing the “natives.” This is not contrition. We, brothers or strangers, need to share that responsibility. It would have been cleanest and healthiest to exchange contrition for everything committed. I will not stop calling the Russians to do that. And I am inviting the Jews to do the same. To repent not for Trotsky, Kamenev and Zinoviev; they are known and anyway can be brushed aside, “they were not real Jews!” Instead, I invite Jews to look honestly into the oppressive depths of the early Soviet system, at all those “invisible” characters such as Isai Davidovich Berg, who created the infamous “gas wagon”2961 which later brought so much affliction on the Jews themselves, and I call on them to 2959M. Vaiskopf. Sobstvenny Platon [Our Own Platon]. // “22”, 1981, (22), p. 168. 2960B. Khazanov. Po kom zvonit zatonuvshy kolokol [For Whom the Sunken Bell Tolls]. // Strana i mir: Obshchestvenno-politichesky, economichesky i kulturno-filosofsky zhurnal [Country and World: Social, Political, Economic and Cultural-Philosophical Journal (henceforth – Country and World]. Munich, 1986, (12), p. 93-94.
look honestly on those many much more obscure bureaucrats who had pushed papers in the Soviet apparatus, and who had never appeared in light. However, the Jews would not be Jews if they all behaved the same. So other voices were heard. As soon as the great exodus of Jews from the USSR began there were Jews who – fortunately for all, and to their honor – while remaining faithful to Judaism, went above their own feelings and looked at history from that vantage point. It was a joy to hear them, and we hear them still. What hope for the future it gives! Their understanding and support are especially valuable in the face of the violently thinned and drastically depleted ranks of Russian intelligentsia. A melancholy view, expressed at end of 19th century, comes to mind: “Every country deserves the Jews it has.”2962 It depends where you look. If it were not for voices from the third wave of emigration and from Israel, one would despair of dialogue and of possibility for mutual understanding between Russians and Jews. Roman Rutman, a cybernetics worker, had his first article published in the émigré Samizdat in 1973. It was a bright, warm story of how he first decided to emigrate and how it turned out – and even then he showed distinct warmth towards Russia. The title was illustrative: “A bow to those who has gone and my brotherhood to those who remain.”2963 Among his very first thoughts during his awakening was “Are we Jews or Russians?”; and among his thoughts on departure there was “Russia, crucified for mankind.” Next year, in 1974, in an article The Ring of Grievances, he proposed to revise “some established ideas on the ‘Jewish question’” and “to recognize the risk of overemphasizing these ideas.” There were three: (1) “The unusual fate of the Jewish people made them a symbol of human suffering”; (2) “A Jew in Russia has always been a victim of unilateral persecution”; and (3) “Russian society is indebted to the Jewish people.” He quoted a phrase from The Gulag Archipelago: “During this war we discovered that the worst thing on earth is to be a Russian” and recognized that the phrase is not artificial or empty, that it is based on war losses, on the revolutionary terror before that, on hunger, on “the wanton destruction of both the nation’s head – its cognitive elite, and its feet, the peasantry.” Although modern Russian literature and democratic movements preach about the guilt of Russian society before Jews, the author himself prefers to see the “circle of grievances” instead of “the saccharine sentimentality about
2961E. Zhirnov. “Protsedura kazni nosila omerzitelny kharakter” [The Execution was Abominable]. // Komsomolskaya Pravda, 1990, October 28, p. 2. 2962M. Morgulis. Evreisky vopros v ego osnovaniyakh i chastnostyakh [The Basics and Details of the Jewish Question]. // Voskhod, St. Petersburg, January 1881, Book 1, p. 18. 2963R. Rutman. Ukhodyashchemu – poklon, ostayushchemusya – bratstvo [A bow to those who has gone and my brotherhood to those who remain]. // New Journal, New York, 1973, (112), p. 284-297.
the troubles and talents of the Jewish people.” “To break this “‘circle of grievances’ one must pull at it from both sides.”2964 Here it is – a thoughtful, friendly and calm voice. And over these years, we many times heard the firm voice of Michael Kheifetz, a recent GULag prisoner. “A champion of my people, I cannot but sympathize with the nationalists of other peoples.”2965 He had the courage to call for Jewish repentance: “The experience of the German people, who have not turned away from their horrifying and criminal past, and who never tried to lay the blame for Nazism on some other culprits, on strangers, etc. but, instead constantly cleansed itself in the fire of national repentance, and thus created a German state that for the first time was admired and respected by all mankind; this experience should, in my opinion, become a paragon for the peoples that participated in the crimes of Bolshevism, including the Jews.” “We, Jews, must honestly analyze the role we played in other nations’ affairs, the role so extraordinarily foretold by Z. Jabotinsky.”2966 M. Kheifetz demonstrated a truly noble soul when he spoke of “the genuine guilt of assimilated Jews before the native peoples of those countries where they live, the guilt, which cannot and must not allow them to live comfortably in the Diaspora.” About Soviet Jewry of the 1920s and 1930s he said: “Who if not us, their bitterly remorseful descendants, has the right to condemn them for this historic mistake [zealous participation in building communism] and the settling of historical scores with Russia for the Pale of Settlement and the pogroms?”2967 (Kheifetz also mentioned that B. Penson and M. Korenblit, who had served labor camp terms along with him, shared his views.) Almost simultaneously with the words of Kheifetz, by then already an emigrant, Feliks Svetov vividly called out for Jewish repentance from inside the Soviet Union in a Samizdat novel Open the doors to me.2968 (It was no accident that F. Svetov, due to his Jewish perceptivity and intelligence, was one of the first to recognize the beginning of Russian religious revival.) Later, during a passionate discourse surrounding the dispute between Astafiev and Edelman, Yuri Shtein described “our Ashkenazi-specific personality traits, formed on the basis of our belief of belonging to the chosen people and an insular, small town mentality. Hence, there is a belief in the infallibility of our nation and our claim to a monopoly on suffering…. It is time for us to see ourselves as a normal nation, worthy but not faultless, like all the 2964R. Rutman. Koltso obid [Circle of Grievances]. // New Journal, New York, 1974, (117), p. 178-189; and in English: Soviet Jewish Affairs, London, 1974, Vol. 4, No. 2, p. 3-11. 2965M. Kheifetz. Russkii patriot Vladimir Osipov [Russian Patriot Vladimir Osipov]. // Kontinent: Literaturny, obshchestvenno-politichesky i religiozny zhurnal [Continent: Literary, Social, Political and Religious Journal (henceforth – Continent]. Paris, 1981, (27), p. 209. 2966M. Kheifetz. Nashi obshchie uroki [The Lessons We Shared].  // “22”, 1980, (14), p. 162163. 2967M. Kheifetz. Evreiskie zametki [The Jewish Notes]. Paris. Tretya volna [The Third Wave], 1978, p. 42, 45. 2968Feliks Svetov. Open the doors to me. Paris: Editeurs Reunls, 1978.
other peoples of the world. Especially now, that we have our own independent state and have already proved to the world that Jews can fight and plow better than some more populous ethnic groups.”2969 During the left liberal campaign against V. Astafiev, V. Belov, and V. Rasputin, literary historian Maria Shneyerson, who, after emigrating, continued to love Russia dearly and appreciate Russian problems, offered these writers her enthusiastic support.2970 In the 1970s, a serious, competent, and  forewarning book on the destruction of the environment in the USSR under communism was published in the West. Written by a Soviet author, it was naturally published under a pseudonym, B. Komarov. After some time, the author emigrated and we learned his name – Zeev Wolfson. We discovered even more: that he was among the compilers of the album of destroyed and desecrated churches in Central Russia.2971 Few active intellectuals remained in the defeated Russia, but friendly, sympathetic Jewish forces supported them. With this shortage of people and under the most severe persecution by the authorities, our Russian Public Foundation was established to help victims of persecution; I donated all my royalties for The Gulag Archipelago to this fund; and, starting with its first talented and dedicated manager, Alexander Ginzburg, there were many Jews and half-Jews among the Fund’s volunteers. (This gave certain intellectually blind extreme Russian nationalists sufficient reason to brand our Foundation as being “Jewish.”) Similarly, M. Bernshtam, then Y. Felshtinsky and D.Shturman were involved in our study of modern Russian history. In the fight against communist lies, M. Agursky, D.Shturman, A. Nekrich, M. Geller, and A. Serebrennikov distinguished themselves by their brilliant, fresh, and  fair-minded journalism. We can also recall the heroism of the American professor Julius Epstein and his service to Russia. In self-centered, always self-righteous, and never regretful of any wrongdoings America, he single-handedly revealed the mystery of Operation Keelhaul, how after the end of the war and from their own continent, Americans handed over to Stalinist agents and therefore certain death, hundreds and thousands of Russian Cossacks, who had naively believed that since they reached the ‘land of free’ they had been saved.2972
2969Yu. Shtein. Letter to Editor.  // Country and World, 1987, (2), p. 112. 2970M. Shneyerson. Razreshennaya pravda [Allowable Truth]. // Continent, 1981, (28); see also: M. Shneyerson. Khudozhestvenny mir pisatelya i pisatel v miru [The Artistic World of an Author and the Author in the World]. // Continent, 1990, (62). 2971B. Komarov. Unichtozhenie prirody [Destruction of the Nature]. Frankfurt: Posev, 1978; Razrushennye i oskvernennye khramy: Moskva i Srednyaya Rossia [Destroyed and Desecrated Churches: Moscow and Central Russia]. Afterword: Predely vandalizma [The Limits of Vandalism]. Frankfurt: Posev, 1980. 2972Julius Epstein. Operation Keelhaul: The Story of Forced Repatriation from 1944 to the Present. Old Greenwich, Connecticut: Devin-Adair, 1973.
All these examples should encourage sincere and mutual understanding between Russians and Jews, if only we would not shut it out by intolerance and anger. Alas, even the mildest remembrance, repentance, and talk of justice elicits severe outcries from the self-appointed guardians of extreme nationalism, both Russian and Jewish. “As soon as Solzhenitsyn had called for national repentance” – meaning among Russians, and the author didn’t mind that – “here we are! Our own people are right there in the front line.” He did not mention any name specifically but he probably referred to M. Kheifetz. “See, it turns out that we are more to blame, we helped … to install … no, not helped, but simply established the Soviet regime ourselves … were disproportionately present in various organs.”2973 Those who began to speak in a voice of remorse were furiously attacked in an instant. “They prefer to extract from their hurrah-patriotic gut a mouthful of saliva” – what a style and nobility of expression! – “and to thoroughly spit on all ‘ancestors,’ to curse Trotsky and Bagritsky, Kogan, and Dunaevsky”; “M. Kheifetz invites us to ‘purge ourselves in the fire of national repentance.’”2974 And what a thrashing F. Svetov received for the autobiographical hero of his novel: “A book about conversion to Christianity … will contribute not to an abstract search for repentance, but to a very specific anti-Semitism…. This book is anti-Semitic.” Yes, and what is there to repent? –The indefatigable David Markish angrily exclaims. Svetov’s hero sees a “betrayal” in the fact that “we desert the country, leaving behind a deplorable condition which is entirely our handiwork: it is we, as it turns out, who staged a bloody revolution, shot the father-tsar, befouled and raped the Orthodox Church and in addition, founded the GULag Archipelago,” isn’t that right? First, these “comrades” Trotsky, Sverdlov, Berman, and Frenkel are not at all related to the Jews. Second, the very question about someone’s collective guilt is wrong.2975 (As to blaming Russians, you see, it is a different thing  altogether: it was always acceptable to blame them en masse, from the times of the elder Philotheus.) David’s brother, Sh. Markish reasons as follows, “as to the latest wave of immigrants from Russia … whether in Israel or in the U.S., they do not exhibit real Russophobia … but a self-hatred that grows into direct anti-Semitism is obvious in them only too often.”2976 See, if Jews repent – it is anti-Semitism. (This is yet another new manifestation of that prejudice.) The Russians should realize their national guilt, “the idea of national repentance cannot be implemented without a clear understanding of national
2973V. Zeev. Demonstratsiya objektivnosti [Pretending to be Evenhanded]. // New American, 1982, June 1-7, (120), p. 37. 2974V. Boguslavsky. V zashchitu Kunyaeva [In Defence of Kunyaev].  // “22”, 1980, (16), p. 166-167, 170. 2975D. Markish. Vykrest [Convert to Christianity]. // “22”, 1981, (18), p. 210. 2976Sh. Markish. O evreiskoi nenavisti k Rossii [On the Jewish Hatred towards Russia]. // “22”, 1984, (38), p. 218.
guilt…. The guilt is enormous, and there is no way to shift it on to others. This guilt is not only about the things of past, it is also about the vile things Russia commits now, and will probably continue committing in the future,” as Shragin wrote in the early 1970s.2977 Well, we too tirelessly call the Russians to repent; without penitence, we will not have a future. After all, only those who were directly affected by communism recognized its evils. Those who were not affected tried not to notice the atrocities and later on to forget and forgive them, to the extent that now they do not even understand what to repent of. (Even more so those who themselves committed the crimes.) Every day we are burning with shame for our unsettled people. And we love it too. And we do not envision our lives without it. And yet, for some reason, we have not lost all faith in it. Still, is it absolutely certain that you had no part in our great guilt,  in our unsuccessful history? Here, Shimon Markish referred to Jabotinsky’s1920s article. “Jabotinsky several times (on different occasions) observed that Russia is a foreign country to us, our interest in her should be detached, cool, though sympathetic; her anxiety, grief and joy are not ours, and our feelings are foreign to her too.” Markish added: “That’s also my attitude towards Russian worries.” And he invites us to “call a spade a spade. However, regarding this delicate point even free western Russians are not awesomely courageous…. I prefer to deal with enemies.”2978 Yet this sentence should be divided into two: is it the case that to “call a spade a spade” and to speak frankly mean being an enemy? Well, there is a Russian proverb: do not love the agreeable; love the disputers. I invite all, including Jews, to abandon this fear of bluntness, to stop perceiving honesty as hostility. We must abandon it historically! Abandon it forever! In this book, I “call a spade a spade”. And at no time do I feel that in doing so it is being hostile to the Jews. I have written more sympathetically than many Jews write about Russians. The purpose of this book, reflected even in its title, is this: we should understand each other, we should recognize each other’s standpoint and feelings. With this book, I want to extend a handshake of understanding – for all our future. But we must do so mutually! This interweaving of Jewish and Russian destinies since the 18th century which has so explosively manifested itself in the 20th century, has a profound historical meaning, and we should not lose it in the future. Here, perhaps, lies
2977B. Shragin, p, 159. 2978Sh. Markish. Eshche raz o nenavisti k samomu sebe [Once Again on Self-Hatred]. “22”, 1980, (16), p. 178-179, 180.
the Divine Intent which we must strive to unravel – to discern its mystery and to do what must be done. And it seems obvious that to know the truth about our shared past is a moral imperative for Jews and Russians alike.
Chapter 26. The beginning of Exodus
The Age of Exodus, as Jews themselves would soon name it, began rather silently: its start can be traced to a December 1966 article in Izvestiya, where the Soviet authorities magnanimously approved “family reunification,” and under this “banner the Jews were given the right to leave the USSR”2979. And then, half a year later, the historic Six-Day War broke out. “Like any epic, this Exodus began with a miracle. And as it should be in an epic, three miracles were revealed to the Jews of Russia – to the Exodus generation”: the miracle of the foundation of Israel, “the miracle of the Purim 1953” (that is, Stalin’s death), and “the miracle of the joyous, brilliant, intoxicating victory of 1967.”2980 The Six-Day War gave a strong and irreversible push to the ethnic consciousness of the Soviet Jews and delivered a blow to the desire of many to assimilate. It created among Jews a powerful motivation for national selfeducation and the study of Hebrew (within a framework of makeshift centers) and gave rise to pro-emigration attitudes. How did the majority of Soviet Jews perceive themselves by the end of the 1960s, on the eve of Exodus? No, those who retrospectively write of a constant feeling of oppression and stress do not distort their memories: “Hearing the word ‘Jew,’ they cringe, as if expecting a blow…. They themselves use this sacramental word as rarely as possible, and when they do have to say it, they force the word out as quickly as possible and in a suppressed voice, as if they were seized by the throat…. Among such people there are those who are gripped by the eternal incurable fear ingrained in their mentality.”2981 Or take a Jewish author who wrote of spending her entire professional life worrying that her work would be rejected only because of her nationality [ethnicity in
2979F. Kolker. Novyi plan pomoshchi sovetskomu evreistvu [A New Plan for Assistance to the Soviet Jewry].  // “22”: Obshchestvenno-politicheskiy i literaturniy zhurnal evreyskoy intelligentsii iz SSSR v Izraile [Social, Political and Literary Journal of the Jewish Intelligentsia from the USSR in Israel (henceforth – “22”)]. Tel-Aviv, 1983, (31), p. 145. 2980V. Boguslavsky. Otsy i deti russkoi alii [Fathers and Children of Russian Aliyah]. // “22”, 1978, (2), p. 176. 2981I. Domalsky. Tekhnologiya nenavisti [The Technology of Hate].  // Vremya i my: Mezhdunarodny zhurnal literatury i obshchestvennykh problem [Epoch and We: International Journal of Literature and Social Problems (henceforth – EW)]. Tel Aviv, 1978, (25), p. 106-107.
American terminology].2982 Despite having an apparently higher standard of living than the general population, many Jews still harbored this sense of oppression. Indeed, cultivated Jews complained more of cultural rather than economic oppression. “The Soviet Jews are trying … to retain their presence in the Russian culture. They struggle to retain the Russian culture in their inner selves.”2983 Dora Shturman recalls: “When the Russian Jews, whose interests are chained to Russia, are suddenly deprived – even if only on paper or in words – of their right to engage in the Russian life, to participate in the Russian history, as if they were interlopers or strangers, they feel offended and bewildered. With the appearance of Tamizdat [a Russian neologism for dissident self-published (Samizdat) literature, published outside the USSR (from the Russian word, ‘tam’, meaning ‘there’ or ‘out there’)] and Samizdat, the xenophobia felt by some Russian authors toward Jews who sincerely identified themselves as Russians manifested itself for the first time in many years, not only on the street level and on the level of state bureaucracy, but appeared on the elite intellectual level, even among dissidents. Naturally, this surprised Jews who identified with Russians.”2984 Galich: “Many people brought up in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s used to regard themselves as Russians from their earliest years, in fact from birth, and indeed … they share all their values and thoughts with the Russian culture.”2985 Another author drew the portrait of “the average modern Russian Jew,” who “would serve this country with good faith and fidelity. He … had carefully examined and identified his own flaws. He had become aware of them…. And now he tries to get rid of them … he has stopped arms flourishing. He has gotten rid of his national peculiarities of speech which were carried over into Russian…. At some point he would aspire to become equal with the Russians, to be indistinguishable from them.” And so: “You might not hear the word ‘Jew’ for years on end. Perhaps, many have even forgotten that you are a Jew. Yet you can never forget it yourself. It is this silence that always reminds you who you are. It creates such an explosive tension inside you, that when you do hear the word ‘Jew,’ it sounds like fate’s blow.” This is a very telling account. The same author describes the cost of this transformation into a Russian. “He had left behind too much” and become spiritually impoverished. “Now, when he needs those capacious, rich and flexible words, he can’t find them….When he looks for but can’t find the right word, something dies inside him,” he had lost “the
2982Ya. Voronel. U kazhdogo svoi dom [Everyone Has a Home].  // “22”, 1978, (2), p. 150151. 2983I. Domalsky. Tekhnologiya nenavisti [The Technology of Hate].  // EW. Tel Aviv, 1978, (25), p. 129. 2984D. Shturman. Razmyshleniya nad rukopisyu [Mulling over the Manuscript].  // “22”, 1980, 812), p. 133. 2985Aleksandr Galich. Pesni. Stikhi. Poemy. Kinopovest. Piesa. Statii [Songs. Verses. Poems. Movie-essay. Piece. Essays]. Ekaterinburg, U-Faktoriya, 1998, p.586.
melodic intonation of Jewish speech” with all its “gaiety, playfulness, mirth, tenacity, and irony.”2986 Of course, these exquisite feelings did not worry each Soviet Jew; it was the lot of the tiniest minority among them, the top cultural stratum, those who genuinely and persistently tried to identify with Russians. It was them who G. Pomeranz spoke about (though he made a generalization for the whole intelligentsia): “Everywhere, we are not quite out of place. Everywhere, we are not quite in our place”; we “have become something like non-Israeli Jews, the people of the air, who lost all their roots in their mundane existence.”2987 Very well put. A. Voronel develops the same theme:  “I clearly see all the sham of their [Jews’] existence in Russia today.”2988 If there’s no merging, there will always be alienation. Nathan Sharansky often mentioned that from a certain point he started to feel being different from the others in Russia. During the Dymshits–Kuznetsov hijacking affair trial in December 1970, L. Hnoh openly stated what he had apparently nurtured for quite a while: “It became unbearable for me to live in a country I don’t regard as my own.” What integrity of mind and courage of word! So it was this feeling that grew among the Soviet Jews, and now increasingly among the broad Jewish masses. Later, in 1982, another Jewish journalist put it like thus: “I am a stranger. I am a stranger in my own country which I love abstractly but fear in reality.”2989 In the beginning of the 1970s, in a conversation with L.K. Chukovskaya she told me (I made a note at the time): “This Exodus was forced on Jewry. I pity those whom the Russians made feel Jewish. The Soviet Jews have already lost their sense of Jewishness and I consider this artificial awakening of their national sense to be specious.” This was far from the truth. Despite the fact that she socialized with many Jews from both capitals, Chukovskaya was mistaken. This Jewish national awakening was not artificial or forced; it was an absolutely natural and even necessary milestone of Jewish history. It was the sudden realization that “one can say ‘Jew’ proudly!”2990 Another Jewish publicist reflected on the experience of his generation of young people in the USSR: “So what are we – the ‘grandchildren’ and heirs of that cruel experiment, who broke through the shell and hatched here in Israel – what are we to say about our fathers and grandfathers? Should we blame them
2986Rani Aren. V russkom galute [In the Russian Galuth].  // “22”, 1981, (19), p. 133-135, 137. 2987G. Pomerantz. Chelovek niotkuda [A Man from Nowhere]. From G. Pomerantz, Unpublished. Frankfurt: Posev, 1972, p. 161, 166. 2988A. Voronel. Trepet iudeiskikh zabot [The Thrills of Jewish Worries]. 2nd Edition, RamatGahn: Moscow-Jerusalem, 1981, p. 122. 2989M. Deich. Zapiski postoronnego [Notes of an outsider] // “22,” 1982, (26), p. 156. 2990R. Rutman. Ukhodyashchemu – poklon, ostayushchemusya – bratstvo [Farewell to those who leaves, brotherhood to those who stay].  // The New Journal, 1973, (112), p. 286.
that they didn’t raise us in Jewish way? Yet our very sense of Jewishness was in great part the result of their (as well as our) failures, catastrophes and despair. So let us appreciate this past…. Is it up to us to throw stones at the shattered skulls of the romantics of yesterday?”2991 This sincerely and honestly expressed intergenerational connection to the fathers and grandfathers, who were so enthusiastic in the early Soviet years, greatly supplements the whole picture. (You can read between the lines the author’s rejection of the benefits and advantages of the ‘new class’ that has replaced those ‘romantics.’) A Samizdat article properly pointed out: “The opinion that the current rise in Jewish ethnic consciousness among assimilated Soviet Jews is just a reaction to the re-emergence of anti-Semitism seems deeply mistaken. What we have here is more likely a coincidence.”2992 Different contemporaries described the development of their Jewish selfidentification somewhat differently. Some wrote that “nearly everyone agreed that nothing was happening in the 1960s” in the sense of national revival, though “after the war of 1967 things began to change.” Yet it was the plane hijacking incident that led to the breakthrough.2993 Others suggest that “Jewish groups were already forming in the mid-1960s in Leningrad, Moscow, and Riga,” and that by the end of the decade a Jewish “underground center” was established in Leningrad. Yet what kind of conspiracy could it be? “Makeshift centers to study Hebrew and Jewish history were formed … and not really for study of Hebrew, but rather for the socialization of people who wished to study it. Actual language usually was learnt not beyond two to three hundred words…. As a rule, all participants were state functionaries, and, like their entire milieu, far removed from the Jewish religion and national traditions alike.” “The Jews of the 1960s had only a vague conception of Zionism.” And yet, “we felt ourselves to be sufficiently Jewish, and saw no need whatsoever for any sort of additional ‘Jewish educational remedy.’” In response to the barrage of antiIsraeli propaganda, “the inner sympathy towards Jewry and to Israel” grew. “Even if we were told then that Israel had abandoned Judaism, it would make no difference for us.” And then the movement “began to transform from an underground to a mass, open … ‘parlour’ phenomenon.” Still, “then nobody believed in the possibility of emigration, at least in our time, yet everyone considered a quite real possibility of ending up in a camp.”2994 (The interviewer comments: “Alas, it is too short a step from conspiracy to ‘devilry‘. I saw this in the Jewish movement of the 1970s, after the trials in Leningrad.”)2995
2991V. Boguslavsky. V zashchitu Kunyaeva [In Defence of Kunyaev].  // “22”, 1980, (16), p. 176. 2992N. Ilsky. Istoriya i samosoznanie [The History and Consciousness].  // The Jews in the USSR, 1977, (15): citation from “22”, 1978, (1), p. 202. 2993A. Eterman. Tretye pokolenie [The Third Generation]. Interview. // “22”, 1986, (47), p. 124. 2994V. Boguslavsky. U istokov [At the Origins]. Interview. // “22”, 1986, (47), p. 102, 105-108. 2995Ibid., p. 109.
Thus, the return to Jewish culture started and continued without counting on emigration and initially did not affect the everyday life of the participants. “I’m not sure that Aliyah [return to Israel] began because of Zionists,” as those first Zionist groups were too weak for this. “To a certain extent, it was the Soviet government that triggered the process by raising a tremendous noise around the Six-Day War. The Soviet press painted the image of a warlike invincible Jew, and this image successfully offset the inferiority complex of the Soviet Jews.”2996 But “hide your ‘Judaic terror’ from your co-workers’ eyes, from your neighbors’ ears!” At first, there was a deep fear: “these scraps of paper, bearing your contact details, were as if you were signing a sentence for yourself, for your children, for your relatives.” Yet soon “we ceased whispering, we began to speak aloud,” “to prepare and celebrate” the Jewish holidays and “study history and Hebrew.” And already from the end of 1969 “the Jews by the  tens and hundreds began signing open letters to the ‘public abroad.’ They demanded to be ‘released’ to Israel.”2997 Soviet Jewry, “separated from world Jewry, trapped in the melting pot of the despotic Stalinist empire … was seemingly irredeemably lost for Jewry – and yet suddenly the Zionist movement was reborn and the ancient Moses’ appeal trumpeted again: ‘Let my people go!’”2998 “In 1970 the whole world began to talk about Russian Jews.” They “rose, they became determined….There is only one barrier separating them from their dream – the barrier of governmental prohibition. To break through, to breech it, to fly through it was their only wish…. ‘Flee from Northern Babylon!’” was the behest of the arrested plane hijackers, the group led by E. Kuznetsov and M. Dymshits.2999 In December 1970 during their trial in Leningrad “they weren’t silent, they didn’t evade, they openly declared that they wanted to steal a plane to fly it across the border to Israel. Remember, they faced the death sentence! Their ‘confessions’ were in essence the declarations of Zionism.”3000 A few months later in May 1971, there was a trial of the ‘Zionist organizations of Leningrad,’ soon followed by similar trials in Riga and Kishinev. These trials, especially the two Leningrad trials, became the new powerful stimulus for the development of the Jewish ethnic consciousness. A new Samizdat journal, The Jews in the USSR, began to circulate soon afterwards, in October 1972. It vividly reported on the struggle for the legalization of emigration to Israel and covered the struggle for the right to freely develop Jewish culture in the USSR.
2996V. Boguslavsky. Oglyanis v razdumye [Look Behind and Think]. Panel discussion. // “22”, 1982, (24), p. 113. 2997V. Boguslavsky. Otsy i deti russkoi alii [Fathers and Children of Russian Aliyah]. // “22”, 1978, (2), p. 176-177. 2998I. Oren. Ispoved [Confession] // “22”, 1979, (7), p. 140. 2999V. Boguslavsky. Otsy i deti russkoi alii [Fathers and Children of Russian Aliyah]. // “22”, 1978, (2), p. 177-178. 3000V. Boguslavsky. U istokov [At the Origins]. Interview. // “22”, 1986, (47), p. 121.
But even at this point only a minority of Jews were involved in the nascent emigration movement. “It seems that the life was easier for the Soviet Jews when they knew that they had no choice, that they only could persevere and adapt, than now, when they’ve got a choice of where to live and what to do…. The first wave that fled from Russia at the end of the 1960s was motivated only by the goal of spending the rest of their lives in the only country without antiSemitism, Israel.”3001 (As the author noted, this does not include those who emigrated for personal enrichment.) And “a part of Soviet Jewry would happily repudiate their national identity, if they were allowed to do so.”3002 – so scared they were. This section included those Jews who cursed ‘that Israel,’ claiming that it is because of Israel that law-abiding Jews are often being prevented from career advancement: “because of those leaving, we too will suffer.” The Soviet government could not but be alarmed by this unexpected (for them as for the whole world) awakening of ethnic consciousness among Soviet Jews. It stepped up propaganda efforts against Israel and Zionism, to scare away the newly conscious. In March 1970 it made use of that well-worn Soviet trick, to get the denunciation from the mouths of the “people themselves,” in this case from the people of “Jewish nationality.” So the authorities staged a denunciatory public press-conference and it was dutifully attended not only by the most hypocritical “official Jews” such as Vergelis, Dragunsky, Chakovsky, Bezymensky, Dolmatovsky, the film director Donsky, the propagandists Mitin and Mintz, but also by prominent people who could easily refuse to participate in the spectacle and in signing the “Declaration” without significant repercussions for themselves. Among the latter were: Byalik: the members of Academy, Frumkin and Kassirsky: the internationally renowned musicians, Fliyer and Zak; the actors, Plisetskaya, Bystritskaya, and Pluchek. But sign it they did. The “Declaration” “heaped scorn on the aggression carried by the Israeli ruling circles … which resurrects the barbarism of the Hitlerites”; “Zionism has always been an expression of the chauvinist views of the Jewish bourgeois and its Jewish raving”; and the signatories intend “to open the eyes of the gullible victims of Zionist propaganda”: “under the guidance of the Leninist party, working Jews have gained full freedom from the hated Tsarism.” Amazing, see who was the real oppressor? The one already dead for half a century! But times had changed by this point. The “official Jews” were publicly rebuked by I. Zilberberg, a young engineer who had decided to irrevocably cut ties with this country and leave. He circulated an open letter in response to the “Declaration” in Samizdat, calling its signatories “lackey souls”, and repudiated his former faith in communism: “we naively placed our hopes in ‘our’ Jews –
3001G. Fain. V roli vysokooplachivaemykh shveitzarov [In the Role of Highly Paid Doorkeepers]. // EW, Tel Aviv, 1976, (12), p. 135. 3002I. Domalsky. Tekhnologiya nenavisti [The Technology of Hate].  // EW. Tel Aviv, 1978, (25), p. 106.
the Kaganovichs, the Erenburgs, etc.” (So, after all, they had once indeed placed their hopes there?) At the same time he criticised Russians: after the 1950s, did “Russians repent and were they contrite … and, after spilling a meagre few tears about the past … did they swear love and commitment to their new-found brothers?” In his mind there was no doubt that Russian guilt Jews was entirely one-sided. Such events continued. Another Samizdat open letter became famous a year later, this one by the hitherto successful film director Mikhail Kalik, who had now been expelled from the Union of Soviet film-makers because he declared his intention to leave for Israel. Kalik unexpectedly addressed  a letter about his loyalty to Jewish culture “to the Russian intelligentsia.” It looked as if he had spent his life in the USSR not among the successful, but had suffered for years among the oppressed, striving for freedom. And now, leaving, he lectured this sluggish Russian intelligentsia from the moral high ground of his victimhood. “So you will stay … with your silence, with your ‘obedient enthusiasm?’ Who then will take care for the moral health of the nation, the country, the society?” Six months later there was another open letter, this time from the Soviet writer Grigory Svirsky. He was driven to this by the fact that he hadn’t been published for several years and even his name had been removed from the Encyclopaedia of Literature in punishment for speaking out against antiSemitism at the Central Literary House in 1968. This punishment he termed “murder,” with understandable fire, though he forgot to glance back and to see how many others suffered in this regard. “I do not know how to live from now on,” he wrote to the Union of Writers. (This was a sentiment common to all 6,000 members of the union: they all believed that the government was bound to feed them for their literary work). These were “the reasons which made me, a man of Russian culture, what is more a Russian writer and an expert on Russian literature, feel myself to be a Jew and to come to the irrevocable decision to leave with my family to Israel”; “I wish to become an Israeli writer.” (But he achieved no such transformation of his profession from one nation to another. Svirsky, like many previous emigrants, had not realized how difficult he would find adjusting to Israel, and chose to leave there too.) The hostile anti-Russian feelings and claims we find in so many voices of the awakened Jewish consciousness surprise and bewilder us, making our hearts bleed. Yet in these feelings of the “mature ferocity” we do not hear any apology proffered by our Jewish brothers for at least the events of 1920s. There isn’t a shadow of appreciation that Russians too are a wronged people. However, we heard some other voices among the “ferocious” in the previous chapter. Looking back on those times when they were already in Israel, they sometimes gave a more sober account: “we spent too much time settling debts with Russia in Jews in the USSR” at the expense even of devoting “too little to Israel and our life there … and thinking too little about the future.”3003
3003R. Nudelman. Oglyanis v razdumye [Look Behind and Think]. Panel discussion. // “22”, 1982, (24), p. 141.
For the ordinary mundane and unarmed living, the prospect of breaking the steel shell that had enveloped the USSR seemed an impossible and hopeless task. But then they despaired – and had to try – and something gave! The struggle for the right to emigrate to Israel was characterised throughout by both determination and inventiveness: issuing complaints to the Supreme Soviet, demonstrations and hunger strikes by the “refuseniks” (as Jews who had been refused exit to Israel called themselves); seminars by fired Jewish professors on the pretext of wanting “to maintain their professional qualifications”; the organization in Moscow of an international symposium of scientists (at the end of 1976); finally, refusal to undergo national service. Of course, this struggle could only be successful with strong support from Jewish communities abroad. ”For us the existence in the world of Jewish solidarity was a startling discovery and the only glimmer of hope in that dark time” remembers one of the first refuseniks.3004 There was also substantial material assistance: “among refuseniks in Moscow there was born a particular sort of independence, founded on powerful economic support from Jews abroad.”3005 And so they attached even more hopes to assistance from the West, now expecting similarly powerful public and even political help. This support had its first test in 1972. Somebody in the higher echelons of the Soviet government reasoned as follows: here we have the Jewish intelligentsia, educated for free in the Soviet system and then provided with opportunities to pursue their academic careers, and now they just leave for abroad to work there with all these benefits subsidized by the Soviet state. Would it not be just to institute a tax on this? Why should the country prepare for free educated specialists, taking up the places loyal citizens might have had, only to have them use their skills in other countries? And so they started to prepare a law to institute this tax. This plan was no secret, and quickly became known and widely discussed in Jewish circles. It became law on August 3, 1972 in the Order of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR “On the compensation by citizens of the USSR, who are leaving to permanently live abroad, of the government expenditure on their education.” The amount proscribed was between 3,600 and 9,800 roubles, depending on the rank of the university (3,600 was in those days the yearly salary of an ordinary senior researcher without a doctorate). A storm of international indignation erupted. During the 55 years of its existence, none of the monstrous list of the USSR’s crimes had caused as united an international protest as this tax on educated emigrants. American academics, 5,000 in number, signed a protest (Autumn 1972); and two thirds of American senators worked together to stop an expected favorable trade agreement with the USSR. European parliamentarians behaved similarly. For their part, 500 Soviet Jews sent an open letter to UN General Secretary Kurt Waldheim (nobody yet
3004N. Rubinshtein. Kto chitatel? [Who is the Reader?]  // EW, Tel Aviv, 1976, (7), p. 131. 3005E. Manevich. Letter to the editor. // EW, New York, 1985, (85), p. 230-231.
suspected that he too would soon be damned) describing: “serfdom for those with a higher education.” (In reaching for a phrase they failed to realize how this would sound in a country which had genuine kolkhoz serfdom). The Soviet government buckled, and consigned the order to the scrapheap. As to the agreement on trade? In April 1973, union leader George Meany argued that the agreement was neither in the interest of the USA nor would it ease international tensions, but the senators were concerned only about Soviet Jews and ignored these arguments. They passed the agreement but adding the “Jackson amendment,” which stated that it would only be agreed to once Jews were allowed to leave the USSR freely. And so the whole world heard the message coming from the American capital: we will help the Soviet government if they release from their country, not everyone, but specifically and only Jews. Nobody declared loud and clear: gentlemen, for 55 years it has been but a dream to escape from under the hated Soviet regime, not for hundreds of thousands but for millions of our fellow citizens; but nobody, ever had the right to leave. And yet the political and social leaders of the West never showed surprise, never protested, never moved to punish the Soviet government with trade restrictions. (There was one unsuccessful attempt in 1931 to organise a campaign against Soviet dumping of lumber, a practise made possible only by the use of cheap convict labour, but even this campaign was apparently motivated by commercial competition). 15 million peasants were destroyed in the “dekulakisation,” 6 million peasants were starved to death in 1932, not even to mention the mass executions and millions who died in the camps; and at the same time it was fine to politely sign agreements with Soviet leaders, to lend them money, to shake their “honest hands”, to seek their support, and to boast of all this in front of your parliaments. But once it was specifically Jews that became the target, then a spark of sympathy ran through the West and it became clear just what sort of regime this was. (In 1972 I made a note on a scrap of paper: “You’ve realized [what’s going on], thank God. But for how long will your realisation last? All it takes is for the problems Jews had with emigrating to be resolved, and you’ll become deaf, blind and uncomprehending again to the entirety of what is going on, to the problems of Russia and of communism.”) “You cannot imagine the enthusiasm with which it [the Jackson amendment] was met by Jews in Russia…. ‘Finally a lever strong enough to shift the powers in the USSR is discovered.’”3006 Yet suddenly in 1975 the Jackson amendment became an irrelevance, as the Soviet government unexpectedly turned down the offer of the trade agreement with the US. (Or it rather calculated that it could get more advantages from other competing countries). The Soviet refusal made an impression on Jewish activists in the USSR and abroad, but not for long. Both in America and Europe support for Jewish
3006V. Perelman. Krushenie chuda: prichiny i sledstviya. Beseda s G. Rosenblyumom [Collapse of the Miracle: Causes and Consequences. Conversation with G. Rosenblum].  // EW, Tel Aviv, 1977, (24), p. 128.
emigration out of the USSR became louder. “The National Conference in Defence of Soviet Jews.” “The Union on Solidarity with Soviet Jewry.” “The Student Committee of Struggle for Soviet Jewry.” On the “Day of National Solidarity with Soviet Jews” more than 100,000 demonstrated in Manhattan, including senators Jackson and Humphrey (both were running for the Democratic nomination for President.) “Hundreds different protests took place…. The  largest of these were the yearly ‘Solidarity Sundays’ – demonstrations and rallies in New York which were attended by up to 250,000 people (these ran from 1974-1987).”3007 A three day meeting of 18 Nobel laureates in support of the Corresponding Member of Academy Levich took place in Oxford. Another 650 academics from across the world gave their support – and Levich was allowed to emigrate. In January 1978 more than a hundred American academics sent a telegram to Brezhnev demanding that he allow professor Meiman to go abroad. Another worldwide campaign ended in another success: the mathematician Chudnovsky received permission to leave for a medical procedure unavailable in the USSR. It was not just the famous: often a name until then unheard of would be trumpeted across the world and then returned to obscurity. For example, we heard it especially loudly in May 1978, when the world press told us a heart-rending story: a seven year old Moscow girl Jessica Katz had an incurable illness, and her parents were not allowed to go to the States! A personal intervention from Senator Edward Kennedy followed, and presto! Success! The press rejoiced. The main news on every television channel broadcast the meeting at the airport, the tears of happiness, the girl held aloft. The Russian Voice of America devoted a whole broadcast to how Jessica Katz was saved (failing to notice that Russian families with sick children still faced the same impenetrable wall). A medical examination later showed that Jessica wasn’t ill at all, and that her cunning parents had fooled the whole world to ensure her leaving. (A fact acknowledged through gritted teeth on the radio, and then buried. Who else would be forgiven such a lie?) Similarly, the hunger strike of V. Borisov (December 1976) who had already spent nine years in a ‘mental asylum’ was reported by the Voice of America no differently from the 15 days of imprisonment of Ilya Levin, and if anything, more attention was given to the latter. All a few refuseniks had to do was sign a declaration about their inability to leave the USSR and it was immediately reported by the Freedom, Voice of America, the BBC and by the other most important sources of mass information, so much so that it is hard now to believe how loudly they were trumpeted. Of course it has to be noted that all the pomp surrounding the appearance of a Soviet Jewish movement served to awaken among worldwide Jewry, including those in America, an exciting conception of themselves as a nation. “Prophetic obsession of the first Zionists” in the USSR “induced exulting sympathy among the Western Jews.” “The Western Jews saw their own ideals in
3007Kratkaya Evreiskaya Entsiklopediya [The Short Jewish Encyclopedia (henceforth—SJE)]. Jerusalem, 1996. v. 8, p. 380.
action. They began to believe in Russian Jews … that meant for them believing in their own best qualities…. All that which Western Jews wanted to see around themselves and … didn’t see.”3008 Others said, with a penetrating irony: “The offered product (an insurrectionary Jewish spirit) found a delighted buyer (American Jews). Neither America, nor American Jews are at all interested in Jews from the USSR in themselves. The product bought was precisely the spirit of Jewish revolt. The Jews of America (and with them the Jews of London, Amsterdam, Paris, etc.), whose sense of Jewishness had been excited by the Six-Day War triumph … saw the chance to participate…. It was a comfortable ‘struggle’… that moreover did not involve any great exertion.”3009 However, it cannot be denied that these inspirations both here and there merged, and worked together to destabilise the walls of the steel shell of the old Soviet Union.
It is the general opinion that mass Jewish emigration from the USSR began in 1971, when 13,000 people left (98% to Israel). It was 32,000 in 1972, 35,000 in 1973 (the proportion going to Israel varying from 85% to 100%).3010 However these were for the most part not from the ethnically Russian areas, but from Georgia and the Baltic. (A Jewish delegate to an international congress declared that “Georgia is a country without anti-Semitism”; many Georgian Jews later became disappointed with their move to Israel and wanted to go back). There was no mass movement from the central part of the USSR. Later, when leaving was made more difficult, some expressed a serious regret (R. Nudelman):  the “tardy courage of future refuseniks might have, perhaps, been unnecessary if they had taken advantage of the breech made when they‘d had the chance.” Someone disagrees: “But people need time to mature! … See how long it took before we understood that we must not stay, that it is simply a crime against your own children.”3011 “Ho, ho, [come forth], and flee from the land of the north, saith the LORD.” (Zech 2:6) Nonetheless, the excitement of Jewish emigration took root in Russian and Ukrainian towns too. By March 1973, 700,000 requests to emigrate had been registered. However, autumn 1973 saw the Yom Kippur War, and the desire of many to emigrate suddenly diminished. “Israel’s image changed sharply after the Yom Kippur War. Instead of a secure and brave rich country, with confidence in tomorrow and a united leadership, Israel unexpectedly appeared 3008A. Voronel. Vmesto poslesloviya [Instead of Afterword].  // “22”, 1983, (31), p. 140. 3009V. Boguslavsky. Oni nichego ne ponyali [They still don’t get it]. // “22”, 1984, (38), p. 156. 3010F. Kolker. Novy plan pomoshchi sovetskomu evreistvu [A New Plan for Assistance to the Soviet Jewry].  // “22”, 1983, (31), p. 144. 3011Yu. Shtern. Situatsia neustoichiva i potomu opasna [The Situation is Unstable and Therefore Dangerous]. Interview. // “22”, 1984, (38), p. 132, 133.
before the world as confused, flabby, ripped apart by internal contradictions. The standard of living of the population fell sharply.”3012 As a result only 20,000 Jews left the USSR in 1974. In 1975-76, “up to 50% of emigrating Soviet Jews” once in the stopover  point of Vienna “went … past Israel. This period saw the birth of the term ‘directists’” – that is to say those who went directly to the United States.3013 After 1977, their numbers “varied from 70 to 98 percent.”3014 “Frankly, this is understandable. The Jewish state had been conceived as a national refuge for Jews of the whole world, the refuge which, to begin with, guarantees them a safe existence. But this did not transpire. The country was in the line of fire for many years.”3015 What is more “it soon became clear that Israel needed not intellectual Soviet Jews … but a national Jewish intelligentsia.” At this point “thinking Jews … realised with a horror that in the way they had defined themselves their whole life they had no place in Israel,” because as it turned out for Israel you had to be immersed in Jewish national culture – and so only then “the arrivals realised their tragic mistake: there had been no point to leaving Russia”3016 (although this was also due to the loss of social position) – and letters back warned those who hadn’t left yet of this. “Their tone and content at that time was almost universally negative. Israel was presented as a country where the government intervenes in and seeks to act paternally in all aspects of a citizen’s life.”3017 “A prejudice against emigration to Israel began to form among many as early as the mid-1970s.”3018 “The firm opinion of Israel that the Moscow and Leningrad intelligentsia began to acquire was of a closed, spiritually impoverished society, buried in its own narrow national problems and letting today’s ideological demands have control over the culture…. At best … it is a cultural backwater, at worst … yet another totalitarian government, lacking only a coercive apparatus.”3019 “Many Soviet Jews gained the impression, not without reason, that in leaving the USSR for Israel they were exchanging one authoritarian regime for another.”3020 3012E. Manevich. Novaya emigratsiya: slukhi i realnost [New Emigration: the Rumors and Reality] . // EW, New York, 1985, (87), p. 107-108. 3013F. Kolker. Novy plan pomoshchi sovetskomu evreistvu [A New Plan for Assistance to the Soviet Jewry].  // “22”, 1983, (31), p. 144. 3014V. Perelman. Oglyanis v somnenii [Look Back in Doubt].  // EW, New York, 1982, (66), p. 152. 3015S. Tsirulnikov. Izrail – god 1986 [Israel, the Year of 1986] . // EW, New York, 1986, (88), p. 135. 3016G. Fain. V roli vysokooplachivaemykh shveitzarov [In the Role of Highly Paid Doorkeepers].  // EW, Tel Aviv, 1976, (12), p. 135-136. 3017E. Manevich. Novaya emigratsiya: slukhi i realnost [New Emigration: the Rumors and Reality] . // EW, New York, 1985, (87), p. 111. 3018E. Finkelshtein. Most, kotory rukhnul… [The Bridge that Had Collapsed].  // “22”, 1984, (38), p. 148. 3019E. Sotnikova. Letter to Editor. // EW, Tel Aviv, 1978, (25), p. 214. 3020M. Nudler. Oglyanis v razdumye [Look Behind and Think]. Panel discussion. // “22”, 1982, (24), p. 138.
When in 1972-73 more than 30,000 Soviet Jews had left for Israel per year, Golda Meir used to meet them personally at the airport and wept, and the Israeli press called their mass arrivals “the Miracle of the 20th century.” Back then “everyone left for Israel. Those who took the road to Rome,” that is to say not to Israel, “were pointed out. But then the number of arrivals started to fall from year to year. It decreased from tens of thousands to thousands, from thousands to hundreds, from hundreds to a few lone individuals. In Vienna, it was no longer those taking the road to Rome [the next stop on the road to the final desired destination, usually the U.S.] who were pointed out, it was those ‘loners,’ those ‘clowns,’ those ‘nuts,’ who still left for Israel.”3021 “Back then Israel used to be the ‘norm’ and you had to explain why you were going ‘past’ it, but it was the other way round now: it was those planning to leave for Israel that often had to explain their decision.”3022 “Only the first wave was idealistic”; “starting with 1974, so to speak the second echelon of Jews began to leave the USSR, and for those Israel might have been attractive, but mainly from a distance.”3023 Another’s consideration: “Perhaps the phenomenon of neshira [neshira – dispersal on the way to Israel; noshrim – the dispersed ones] is somehow connected to the fact that initial emigration used to be from the hinterlands [of the USSR], where [Jewish] traditions were strong, and now it’s more from the centre, where Jews have substantially sundered themselves from their traditions.”3024 Anyway, “the more open were the doors into Israel, the less Jewish was the efflux,” the majority of activists barely knowing the Hebrew alphabet.3025 ”Not to find their Jewishness, but to get rid of it … was now the main reason for emigration.”3026 They joked in Israel that “the world has not been filled with the clatter of Jewish feet running to settle in their own home…. Subsequent waves quickly took into account the mistake of the vanguard, and instead enthusiastically leapt en masse to where others’ hands had already built their own life. En masse, it should be noted, for here finally was that much spoken of ‘Jewish unity.’”3027 But of course these people “left the USSR in search of ‘intellectual freedom,’ and so must live in Germany or England” or more simply in the United States.3028 And a popular excuse was that the Diaspora is needed as “somebody has to give money to resource-less Israel and to make noise when it
3021V. Perelman. Letter to Editor. // EW, Tel Aviv, 1977, (23), p. 217. 3022Yu. Shtern. Dvoinaya otvetstvennost [Dual Liability]. Interview // “22”, 1981, (21), p. 126. 3023E. Manevich. Novaya emigratsiya: slukhi i realnost [New Emigration: the Rumors and Reality].  // EW, New York, 1985, (87), p. 109-110. 3024G. Freiman. Dialog ob alie i emigratsii [The Dialog (with Voronel) on Aliyah and Emigration]. // “22”, 1983, (31), p. 119. 3025A. Eterman. Tretye pokolenie [The Third Generation] Interview // “22”, 1986, (47), p. 126 3026B. Orlov. Puti-dorogi “rimskikh piligrimov” [The Ways and Roads of “Roman Pilgrims”] // EW, Tel Aviv, 1977, (14), p. 126. 3027A. Voronel. Oglyanis v razdumye [Look Behind and Think]. Panel discussion. // “22”, 1982, (24), p. 117-118. 3028E. Levin. Oglyanis v razdumye [Look Behind and Think]. Panel discussion. // “22”, 1982, (24), p. 127.
is being bullied! But on the other hand, the Diaspora perpetuates antiSemitism.”3029 A. Voronel made a broader point here: “”The situation of Russian Jews and the problem of their liberation is a reflection of the all-Jewish crisis…. The problems of Soviet Jews help us to see the disarray in our own ranks”; “the cynicism of Soviet Jews” in using calls from made up relatives in Israel instead of “accepting their fate, the Way of Honour, is nothing more than a reflection of the cynicism and the rot affecting the whole Jewish (and non-Jewish) world”; “questions of conscience move further and further into background under the influence of the business, the competition and the unlimited possibilities of the Free World.”3030 So it’s all quite simple – it was just a mass escape from the harsh Soviet life to the easy Western one, quite understandable on a human level. But then what’s about “repatriation?” And what is the “spiritual superiority” of those who dared to leave over those who stayed in the “country of slaves”? In fighting in those days for emigration Soviet Jews loudly demanded: “Let my people go!” But that was a truncated quote. The Bible said: “Let my people go, that they may hold a feast unto me in the wilderness.” (Ex. 5:1) Yet somehow too many of those released went not into the desert, but to the abundance of America.
Can we nonetheless say that in the early years of sudden and successful emigration to Israel, it was the Zionists beliefs and ambitions that acted as the prime stimulus for Jews to leave? The testimony of various Jewish writers would suggest not. “The Soviet situation of the end of the 1960s was one of Aliyah, not of a Zionist movement. There were many people psychologically ready to flee the USSR. What can be called a Zionist movement was entirely subsidiary to this group of people.”3031 Those who joined makeshift centres dedicated to the actual study of Jewish history and culture “were mostly characterised by a complete lack of the careerism so common among the Soviet-Jewish intelligentsia. This was why they dedicated the entirety of their free time to Jewish affairs.”3032 For them the “era of the Hebrew teachers” had started even as early as the end of the 1970s, and by the beginning of the 1980s these “Torah teachers were the only ones who still influenced the minds.”3033 The motives of many others who emigrated are explained as follows: “The Soviet government has placed obstacles in the way of achieving the most 3029A. Dobrovich. Letter to Editor. // “22”, 1989, (67), p. 218. 3030A. Voronel. Vmesto poslesloviya [Instead of Afterword]. // “22”, 1983, (31), p. 139-141. 3031V. Boguslavsky. Oglyanis v razdumye [Look Behind and Think]. Panel discussion. // “22”, 1982, (24), p. 139. 3032V. Boguslavsky. U istokov [At the Origins]. Interview. // “22”, 1986, (47), p. 105. 3033A. Eterman. Tretye pokolenie [The Third Generation]. Interview // “22”, 1986, (47), p. 136-140.
important things – professional advancement,” and so “Jewry is in danger of degradation.”3034 “They were driven into Jewishness, and then into Zionism … by their faceless bureaucratic nemesis.”3035 “Many … had never encountered anti-Semitism or political persecution. What burdened them was the dead end that their lives as Soviet Jews had become – as bearers of a contradiction from which they could free themselves neither by ‘assimilation’ nor by their ‘Jewishness’”3036 “There was a growing sense of incompatibility and sorrow”; “dozens and dozens of dolts … are dragging you into insignificance … are pushing you to the bottom.”3037 So came the longing to escape the Soviet Union. “This bright hope, when a man under the complete control of the Soviet government could in three months become free … was genuinely exhilarating.”3038 Of course, a complex emotional environment developed around the act of departure. A writer says: the majority of Soviet Jews are “using the same ‘Zionist’ door … they sadly leave that familiar, that tolerant Russia” (a slip, but one that is closer to the truth, as the author had meant to say “tolerated by” Jews).3039 Or said thusly: “The vast majority decided to emigrate with their heads, while their insides,” that is to say concern with being part of a country and its traditions, “were against.”3040 No one can judge to what extent this was a “majority.” But as we’ve seen the mood varied from the good poetry of Liya Vladimorova: But for you my beloved, for you the proud, I bequest the memories and the departure to the then-popular joke: “Could the last person to leave please turn off the lights.” This growing desire to emigrate among Soviet Jews coincided with the beginning of the “dissident” movement in the USSR. These developments were not entirely independent: “for some of them [Jewish intellectuals] ‘Jewish ethnic consciousness in the USSR’ was a new vector of intellectual development … a new form of heterodoxy,”3041 and they regarded their own impatient escape from the country as also a desperately important political cause. In essence, the dilemma facing the Zionists at the start of the 20th century was repeated: if it is your aim to leave Russia, should you at the same time maintain a political struggle within it? Back then, most had answered “yes” 3034A. Voronel. Dialog ob alie i emigratsii [The Dialog (with G. Freiman) on Aliyah and Emigration]. // “22”, 1983, (31), p. 119. 3035Lev Kopelev. O pravde i terpimosti [On Truth and Tolerance]. New York: Khronika Press, 1982, с. 61. 3036Editorial. (R. Nudelman] // “22”, 1979, (7), p. 97. 3037E. Angenits. Spusk v bezdnu [Descend into Abyss]. // “22”, 1980, (15), p. 166, 167. 3038A. Eterman. Tretye pokolenie [The Third Generation] Interview // “22”, 1986, (47), p. 125. 3039V. Boguslavsky. V zashchitu Kunyaeva [In Defence of Kunyaev].  // “22”, 1980, (16), p. 175. 3040V. Lyubarsky. Chto delat, a ne kto vinovat [The Question Is Not Who Is Guilty, But What to Do]. // EW, New York, 1990, (109), p. 129. 3041B. Khazanov. Novaya Rossiya [The New Russia].  // EW, Tel Aviv, 1976, (8), p. 143.
to the struggle; now, most answered “no.” But an increasingly daredevil attitude to emigration could not but feed a similarly daredevil attitude to politics, and sometimes the daredevils were one and the same. So for example (in 1976) several activists in the Jewish movement — V. Rubin, A. Sharansky, V. Slepak — together made an independent decision to support the “Helsinki Group” of dissidents, “but this was regarded in Jewish circles as an unjustifiable and unreasonable risk,” as it would lead “to the immediate and total escalation of the government’s repression of Jewish activism,” and would moreover turn the Jewish movement “into the property of dissidents.”3042 On the other side, many dissidents took advantage of the synchronicity of the two movements, and used emigration as a means of escape from their political battlefield for their own safety. They found theoretical justifications for this: “Any honest man in the USSR is an eternal debtor to Israel, and here is why…. The emigration breech was made in the iron curtain thanks to Israel … it protects the rear of those few people willing to oppose the tyranny of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union [CPSU] and to fight for human rights in the USSR. The absence of this ‘emergency exit’ would be deadly to the current democratic movement.”3043 It has to be admitted that this is a very cynical justification, and that it says little good of the dissident movement as a whole. A hostile critic then noted: “these ‘opponents’ [of the CPSU] are playing an odd game: they become involved in the democratic movement, already sure of an ‘emergency exit’ for themselves. But by this they demonstrate the temporary and inconsequential character of their activity. Do potential emigrants have the right to speak of changing Russia, or especially on behalf of Russia?”3044 One dissident science fiction author (and later, after emigration, a Russian Orthodox priest) suggested this formulation, that Jewish emigration creates “a revolution in the mind of Soviet man”; “the Jews, in fighting for the right to leave, become transformed into fighters for freedom” in general….”The Jewish movement serves as a social gland that begins to secrete the hormones of rights awareness;” it has become “a sort of ferment perpetuating dissidence.” “Russia is becoming ‘deserted,’” “that ‘abroad,’ so mythical before, is becoming populated by our own people,” “the Jewish Exodus … is gradually leading totalitarian Soviet Moscow to the plains of freedom.”3045 This view was readily accepted and in the coming years came to be loudly trumpeted:  “the right to emigrate is the primary human right.” It was repeated often and in unison that this was an “enforced escape,” and “talk about the privileged position Jews occupy with regards to emigration is slander.”3046
3042V. Lazaris. Ironicheskaya pesenka [Ironic Song]. // “22”, 1978, (2), p. 207. 3043I. Melchuk. Letter to Editor // EW, Tel Aviv, 1977, (23), p. 213-214. 3044V. Lazaris. Ironicheskaya pesenka [Ironic Song]. // “22”, 1978, (2), p. 200. 3045M. Aksenov-Meerson. Evreiskii iskhod v rossiiskoi perspective [The Jewish Exodus from Russian Point of View]. // EW, Tel Aviv, 1979, (41). 3046G. Sukharevskaya. Letter to Editor. // Seven Days, New York, 1984, (51).
Yes, taking a lifeboat from a sinking ship is indeed an act of necessity. But to own a lifeboat is a great privilege, and after the gruelling ordeals of half a century in the USSR Jews owned one, while the rest did not. Those more perceptive expressed a more conscientious feeling: “It is fine to fight for the repatriation of Jews, it is understandable, and it is fine to fight for the right to emigrate for everyone – that too is understandable; but you cannot fight for the right to emigrate but, for some reason, only for Jews.”3047 Contrary to the selfsatisfied theoreticians of emigration, and their belief that it brought all Soviet people closer to emigrating abroad and so partly freed them, in reality those unable to emigrate came to feel more hopeless, to an even greater extent fooled and enslaved. There were emigrants who understood this: “What is cruellest about this situation is that it is Jews who are leaving. It has bizarrely become a question of something akin to a certificate of authenticity.”3048 Precisely. But they chose to blind themselves to this. What could the remaining residents of “totalitarian Moscow” think? There was a great variety of responses, from grievance (“You, Jews, are allowed to leave and we aren’t…”) to the despair of intellectuals. L.K Chukovksaya expressed it in conversation to me: “Dozens of valuable people are leaving, and as a result human bonds vital for the country are ripped apart. The knots that hold together the fabric of culture are being undone.” To repeat the lesson: “Russia is becoming deserted.” We can read the thoughtful comments of an emigrant Jewish author about this Departure: “Russian Jewry were pathfinders in their experiment to merge with the Russian people and Russian culture, they became involved in Russia’s fate and history, and, repulsed away as if by a similarly charged body, left.” (What an accurate and penetrating comparison!) “What is most stunning about this Departure is how, at the moment of greatest assimilation, voluntary it was…. The pathetic character of the Russian Aliyah of the 1970s … was that we were not exiled from the country on a king’s order or by the decision of party and parliament, and we were not fleeing to save ourselves from the whips of an enraged popular pogrom … this fact is not immediately obvious to the participants in this historical event.”3049 No doubt, the Jewish emigration from the USSR ushered in a great historical shift. The beginning of the Exodus drew a line under an epoch lasting two centuries of coerced co-existence between Jews and Russians. From that point every Soviet Jew was free to choose for himself — to live in Russia or outside it. By the second half of the 1980s each was entirely free to leave for Israel without struggle. The events that took place over two centuries of Jewish life in Russia – the Pale of Settlement,the escape from its stultifying confines, the flowering, the 3047I. Shlomovich. Oglyanis v razdumye [Look Behind and Think]. Panel discussion. // “22”, 1982, (24), p. 138. 3048B. Khazanov. Novaya Rossiya [The New Russia] // EW, Tel Aviv, 1976, (8), p. 143. 3049B. Orlov. Ne te vy uchili alfavity [You Have Studied Wrong Alphabets]. // EW, Tel Aviv, 1975, (1), p. 127-128.
ascension to the ruling circles of Russia, then the new constraints, and finally the Exodus – none of these are random streams on the outskirts of history. Jewry had completed its spread from its origin on the Mediterranean Sea to as far away as Eastern Europe, and it was now returning back to its point of origin. We can see in both this spread and in its reversal a supra-human design. Perhaps those that come after us will have the opportunity to see it more clearly and to solve its mystery.
Chapter 27. About the assimilation
When and how did this extraordinary Jewish status of “guests everywhere” begin? The conventional wisdom suggests that the centuries-old Jewish diaspora should be dated from the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus in AD70; and that, after being thrown out of their native land, the Jews began wandering around the world. However, it is not true because “the great majority of the Jews were already dispersed by that time; hardly more than one-eighth of the nation lived in Palestine.”3050 The Jewish Diaspora had begun much earlier: “The Jews were mainly a dispersed nation by the time of the Babylonian captivity [6th century B.C.] and, possibly, even earlier; Palestine was only a religious and, to certain extent, a cultural center.”3051 Scattering of the Jews was already foretold in the Pentateuch. “I will scatter you among the nations” (Leviticus 26:33). “Yahweh will scatter you among the peoples, and you shall be left few in number among the nations” (Deuteronomy 4:27). “Only a small part of the Jews had returned from the [Babylonian] captivity; many had remained in Babylon as they did not want to abandon their property.” Large settlements were established outside of Palestine; “large numbers of Jews concentrated … in major trade and industrial centers of the ancient world.” (For example, in Alexandria under Ptolemaic dynasty, Jews accounted for two-fifth of the population.) “They were, mainly, traders and craftsmen.”3052 The Jewish-Hellenistic philosopher Philo Judaeus (who died in the middle of the 1st century, 20 years before the destruction of the Temple) states: “[The Jews] regard the Holy City as their metropolis because the Holy Temple of Almighty God is situated there, and they call “homeland” the countries where they live, and where their fathers, grandfathers, greatgrandfathers and ancient forebears lived, and where they were born and brought up.”3053 Mikhail Gershenzon mused on the fates of the Jewish nation after the Babylonian captivity: “[The Jews] took roots in foreign lands and, contrary to 3050I.M. Bikerman. K samopoznaniyu evreya: Chem my byli, chem my stali, chem my dolzhny byt [To the Self-Knowledge of a Jew: What We Were, What We Became, What We Must Be]. Paris, 1939, p. 17. 3051S.Ya. Lurye. Antisemitizm v drevnem mire [Anti-Semitism in the Ancient World]. Tel-Aviv: Sova, 1976, p. 160 [1st ed. – Petrograd: Byloye, 1922]. 3052Ibid.*, p. 64, 122, 159. 3053S.Ya. Lurye. Antisemitizm v drevnem mire* [Anti-Semitism in the Ancient World], p. 160.
expectations, didn’t aspire to return to their old homeland.” “Just recall: the Kingdom of Judah was still there, yet most of the Jews were already scattered across the whole Middle East; the Second Temple still stood in all its splendor, but the Language of the Bible was no longer heard on the streets and in the houses of Jerusalem; everybody spoke either Syrian or Greek there.” Even back then the Jews were inclined to think: “We should not hold dear our national independence, we should learn to live without it, under foreign rule; we should not become attached to a land or to a single language.”3054 Modern Jewish authors agree: “The Jews in the ancient world were scattered and established large centers in the Diaspora even before the collapse of Jewish nationhood.”3055 “The nation which was given the Law did not want to return to its native country. There is some very profound and still not understood meaning in it. It is much easier to chat about Jewish values and about the preservation of Jewry than to explain the true reasons for such a long Galut.”3056 (Even in the mid-20th century the Hebrew language still had no word for “Diaspora” as for the living in the voluntary scattering, there was only “Galut,” referring to the forced exile.) From the historical evidence we see that the scattering of the Jews was not solely their unfortunate fate, but also a voluntary quest. Indeed, it was a bemoaned disaster, but could it also be a method of making life easier? This is an important question in attempting to understand the Diaspora. The Jews still do not have a generally accepted view on the Diaspora, whether it has been blessing for them or a bane. Zionism, from the very moment of its birth, responded to this question firmly (and fully in line with its essence): “Our scattering is our biggest curse; it brings us no good, and no advantages and no peace to others as well…. We are guests everywhere … and we are still unwanted, everybody wants to get rid of us.”3057 “To be a homeless man, feeling as a guest everywhere — this is the true curse of exile, its real bitterness!”3058 “Some say that having several ‘homes’ improves chances to survive for the Jews. In my view, a nation staying in many
3054M. Gershenzon. Sudby evreyskogo naroda [The Destinies of the Jewish Nation] // “22”: Obshchestvenno-politicheskiy i literaturniy zhurnal evreyskoy intelligentsii iz SSSR v Izraile [Social, Political and Literary Journal of the Jewish Intelligentsia from the USSR in Israel]. Tel-Aviv, 1981, (19), p. 109-110. 3055S. Tsiryulnikov. Filosofiya evreyskoy anomalii [Philosophy of the Jewish Anomaly] // Vremya i my (daleye – VM): Mezhdunarodny zhurnal literatury i obshchestvennykh problem [Epoch and We (hereinafter – EW): International Journal of Literature and Social Problems]. New York, 1984, (77), p. 148. 3056A.-B. Yoshua. Golos pisatelya [Voice of the Writer] // “22”, 1982, (27), p. 158. 3057Max Brod. Lyubov na rasstoyanii [Love at the Distance] // TW, Tel-Aviv, 1976, (11), p. 197-198. 3058Amos Oz. O vremeni i o sebe [On Time and on Me] // Kontinent: Literaturny, obshchestvenno-politicheskiy i religiozny zhurnal [Continent: Literary, Social, Political and Religious Journal]. Moscow, 1991, (66), p. 260.
other’s homes and not caring about its own cannot expect security. The availability of many homes corrupts.”3059 Yet the opposite opinion is even more prevalent, and it seems to be more credible. “Perhaps, the Jewish nation had survived and persevered not in spite of its exile, but because of it; the Jewish Diaspora is not an episode, but the organic ‘ingredient’ of Jewish history.”3060 “Was the Jewish nation preserved in all its uniqueness in spite of the exile and scattering or because of it? The tragedy of Jerusalem in AD70 destroyed the state, yet it was necessary to save the people”; “the extraordinarily intensified instinct of national self-preservation” prompted Jews toward salvation through Diaspora.”3061 “Jewry was never able to fully comprehend its situation and the causes for it. They saw exile as the punishment for their sins, yet time and time again it turned out to be the dispensation by which the Lord has distinguished his nation. Through the Diaspora, the Jew worked out the mark of the Chosen he foresaw on his brow…. The scattered state of the nation is not unnatural for him…. Already in the periods of the most comfortable existence in their own state, Jewry was stationing garrisons on its route and spearheading vanguards in all directions, as if sensing its future dispersion and getting ready to retreat to the positions it had prepared in advance.” “Thus, the Diaspora is a special form of Jewish existence in space and time of this world.”3062 And look how awesomely mobile are the Jews in Diaspora. “The Jewish people never strike root in one place, even after several generations.”3063 But after they were so widely scattered and had become small minorities among other nations, the Jews had to develop a clear position toward those nations — how to behave among them and how to relate to them, to seek ultimate bonding and merging with those nations, or to reject them and separate from them? The Holy Scripture contains quite a few covenants of isolation. The Jews avoided even their closest kindred neighbors, the Samaritans and Israelites, so irreconcilably that it was not permitted to even take a piece of bread from them. Mixed marriages were very strictly forbidden. “We will not give our daughters to the peoples of the land or take their daughters for our sons.” (Nehemiah 10:30) And Ezra had ordered them to dissolve even the existing marriages, even those with children. Thus, living in Diaspora for thousands of years, the Jews did not mix with other nations, just as butter does not mix with water, but comes to the surface and floats. During all those long centuries, they perceived themselves as something distinct, and until the 18th century “the Jews as a nation have never
3059A.-B. Yoshua. Golos pisatelya [Voice of the Writer] // “22”, 1982, (27), p. 159. 3060S. Tsiryulnikov. Filosofiya evreyskoy anomalii [Philosophy of the Jewish Anomaly] // EW, New York, 1984, (77), p. 149-150. 3061P. Samorodnitskiy. Stranny narodets [Strange Little Nation] // “22”, 1980, (15), p. 153, 154. 3062E. Fishteyn. Iz galuta s lyubovyu [From the Galut with Love] // “22”, 1985, (40), p. 112114. 3063M. Shamir. Sto let voyny [One Hundred Years of War] // “22”, 1982, (27), p. 167.
shown any inclination for assimilation.” The pre-revolutionary Jewish Encyclopedia, while quoting Marx’s assertion that “the Jews had not assimilated, because they represented the highest economic class, that is the class of capitalists amidst the agricultural and petty bourgeois nations,” objects, saying that the economy was secondary: “the Jews of the Diaspora have consciously established their own economy which protected them from assimilation. They did it because they were conscious of their cultural superiority,” which, for its part, was created by “the spiritual meaning of Judaism in its most complete form. The latter protected them from imitation.”3064 But “from the mid-18th century the Jews started to believe in assimilation, and that becomes … the ferment of decomposition of the Jewish nation in Western Europe of the 19th century.” Assimilation begins when “the surrounding culture reaches the height held by the Jewish culture, or when the Jewry ceases to create new values.” The national will of the European Jews was weakened by the end of the 18th century; it had lost ground because of extremely long waiting. Other nations began creating brilliant cultures that eclipsed Jewish culture.”3065 And exactly then Napoleon launched the PanEuropean emancipation; in one country after another, the roads to social equality were opening before the Jews, and that facilitated assimilation. (There is an important caveat here: “There is no unilateral assimilation,” and “the assimilating Jews supplemented the host cultures with Jewish national traits.” Heine and Börne, Ricardo and Marx, Beaconsfield-Disraeli and Lassalle, Meyerbeer and Mendelssohn — “during their assimilation into the host cultures, they added Jewish elements to them.”3066) In some cases, assimilation leads to a brighter creative personal selffulfillment. But, overall, “assimilation was the price paid by the Jews for the benefit of having access to the European culture. Educated Jews convinced themselves that “the Jews are not a nation, but only a religious group.”3067 “The Jewish nation, after it joined the realm of European nations, began to lose its national uniqueness … only the Jew from the ghetto retained pronounced national traits … while the intelligent Jew tried with all his strength to look unlike a typical Jew.” Thus spread “the theory that there is no Jewish nation, but only ‘the Poles, Frenchmen and Germans of Mosaic Law.’”3068 3064Evreyskaya Entsiklopediya (daleye – EE) [The Jewish Encyclopedia (hereinafter – TJE)]: 16 volumes. Sankt-Petersburg.: Obshchestvo dlya Nauchnykh Evreyskikh Izdaniy i Izd-vo Brokgauz-Efron [St. Petersburg: Society for Scientific Jewish Publications and Publisher Brokgauz-Efron], 1906-1913. V. 3, p. 312. 3065Ibid., p. 313. 3066Ibid. 3067M. Krol. Natsionalizm i assimilyatsiya v evreyskoy istorii [Nationalism and Assimilation in the Jewish History] // Evreyskiy mir: Ezhegodnik na 1939 g. (daleye – EM-1) [The Jewish World: Yearbook for 1939 (hereinafter – JW-1)]. Paris: Obyedineniye russko-evreyskoy intelligentsii [Association of Russian-Jewish Intelligentsia], p. 187. 3068I.L. Klauzner. Literatura na ivrite v Rossii [Literature in Hebrew in Russia] // Kniga o russkom evreystve: Ot 1860-kh godov do Revolyutsii 1917 g. [Book on the Russian Jewry:
Marx, and then Lenin saw the solution of Jewish question in the full assimilation of the Jews in the countries of their residence. In contrast to the clumsiness of those ideologues, the ideas of M.O. Gershenzon are much more interesting. He put them forward late in life, in 1920, and they are all the more interesting because the lofty thinker Gershenzon was a completely assimilated Russian Jew. Nevertheless, the Jewish question was alive and well in his mind. He explored it in his article The Destinies of the Jewish Nation. Unlike the contemporary Jewish Encyclopedia, Gershenzon believes that Jewish assimilation is the ancient phenomenon, from time immemorial. One voice constantly “tempted him [the Jew] to blend with the environment — hence comes this ineradicable and ancient Jewish aspiration to assimilate.” Yet another voice “demanded above all things to preserve his national uniqueness. The whole story of scattering is the never-ending struggle of two wills within Jewry: the human will against the superhuman one, the individual against the collective…. The requirements of the national will towards the individual were so ruthless and almost beyond human power, that without having a great hope common to all Jewry, the Jew would succumb to despair every now and then, and would be tempted to fall away from his brethren and desert that strange and painful common cause.” Contrary to the view that it is not difficult to explain why assimilation began precisely at the end of the 18th century, Gershenzon is rather surprised: “Is it not strange that assimilation so unexpectedly accelerated exactly during the last one hundred years and it continues to intensify with each passing hour? Shouldn’t the temptation to fall apart be diminished greatly nowadays, when the Jews obtained equal rights everywhere?” No, he replies: “It is not the external force that splits the Jews; Jewry disintegrates from the inside. The main pillar of Jewry, the religious unity of the Jewish nation, is decayed and rotten.” So, what about assimilation, where does it lead to? “At first sight, it appears that … [the Jews] are imbued, to the marrow of their bones, with the cosmopolitan spirit or, at least, with the spirit of the local culture; they share beliefs and fixations of the people around them.” Yet it is not exactly like that: “They love the same things, but not in the same way…. They indeed crave to embrace the alien gods… They strive to accept the way of life of modern culture…. They pretend that they already love all that — truly love, and they are even able to convince themselves of that.” Alas! One can only love his own faith, “the one born in the throes from the depths of the soul.”3069 Jewish authors genuinely express the spiritual torment experienced by the assimilating Jew. “If you decided to pretend that you are not a Jew, or to change your religion, you are doomed to unending internal struggle with your Jewish identity…. You live in terrible tension…. In a way, this is immoral, a sort of
From the 1860s until the 1917 Revolution]. New York: Soyuz Russkikh Evreyev [The Union of Russian Jews], 1960, p. 506. 3069M. Gershenzon. Sudby evreyskogo naroda [The Destinies of the Jewish Nation] // “22”, 1981, (19), p. 111-115.
spiritual self-violation.”3070 (This inner conflict was amazingly described by Chekhov in his essay Tumbleweed.) “This evil stepmother — assimilation … forced the individual to adapt to everything: to the meaning of life and human relations, to demands and needs, to the way of life and habits. It crippled the psychology of the nation in general and … that of the national intelligentsia in particular.” It compelled people “to renounce their own identity, and, ultimately, led to self-destruction.”3071 “It is a painful and humiliating search of identity.”3072 But even “the most complete assimilation is ephemeral: it never becomes natural,” it does not liberate “from the need to be on guard” all the time.3073 In addition to the lack of trust on the part of surrounding native people, assimilating Jews come under fire from their fellow Jews; they are accused of “consumerism and conformism,” of “the desire to desert their people, to dispose of their Jewish identity,” and of “the national defection.”3074 Nevertheless, during the 19th century everything indicated that assimilation was feasible and necessary, that it was predetermined and even inevitable. Yet the emergence of Zionism cast a completely new light on this problem. Before Zionism, “every Jew suffered from painful duality,”3075 the dissonance between the religious tradition and the surrounding external world. In the early 20th century Jabotinsky wrote: “When the Jew adopts a foreign culture … one should not trust the depth and strength of such conversion. The assimilated Jew cannot withstand a single onslaught, he abandons the ‘adopted’ culture without any resistance whatsoever, as soon as he sees that the power of that culture is over … he cannot be the pillar for such a culture.” He provided a shining example of the Germanized Austria-Hungary, when, with the growth of Czech, Hungarian and Polish cultures, Germanized Jews actively conformed to new ways of life. “It is all about certain hard realities of the natural relationship between a man and his culture, the culture created by his ancestors.”3076 This observation is true, of course, though “hard realities” sounds somewhat dry. (Jabotinsky not only objected to assimilation fiercely, he also insistently warned
3070N. Podgorets. Evreyi v sovremennom mire [The Jews in the Modern World]: [Interview] // EM, New York, 1985, (86), p. 117. 3071V. Levitina. Stoilo li szhigat’ svoy khram…. [Should We Really Burn Our Temple….] // “22”, 1984, (34), p. 194. 3072Boguslavskiy. Zametki na polyakh [Marginal Notes] // “22”, 1984, (35), p. 125. 3073O. Rapoport. Simptomy odnoy bolezni [Symptoms of One Disease] // “22”, 1978, (1), p. 122. 3074L. Tsigel’man-Dymerskaya. Sovetskiy antisemitizm – prichiny i prognozy [Soviet AntiSemitism – Causes and Forecasts]: [Seminar] // “22”, 1978, (3), p. 173-174. 3075G. Shaked. Trudno li sokhranit’ izrail’skuyu kul’turu v konfrontatsii s drugimi kul’turami [Is It Difficult to Preserve Jewish Culture in Confrontation with Other Cultures] // “22”, 1982, (23), p. 135. 3076Vl. Jabotinsky. Na lozhnom puti [On a False Road] // Vl. Jabotinsky. Felyetony [Feuilletons]. Sankt-Petersburg: Tipografiya “Gerold” [St. Petersburg: Gerold Printing Establishment], 1913, p. 251, 260-263.
the Jews to avoid Russian politics, literature and art, cautioning that after a while the Russians would inevitably turn down such service.3077) Many individual and collective examples, both in Europe and Russia, in the past and nowadays, illustrate the fragility of Jewish assimilation. Consider Benjamin Disraeli, the son of a non-religious father; he was baptized in adolescence and he did not just display the English way of life, he became no less than the symbol of the British Empire. So, what did he dream about at leisure, while riding his novel-writing hobby-horse? He wrote about exceptional merits and Messianism of the Jews, expressed his ardent love to Palestine, and dreamt of restoring the Israeli homeland!3078 And what’s about Gershenzon? He was a prominent historian of Russian culture and an expert on Pushkin. He was even criticized for his “Slavophilism.” But, nevertheless, at the end of his life, he wrote: “Accustomed to European culture from a tender age, I deeply imbibed its spirit … and I truly love many things in it…. But deep in my mind I live differently. For many years a secret voice from within appeals to me persistently and incessantly: This is not yours! This is not yours! A strange will inside me sorrowfully turns away from [Russian] culture, from everything happening and spoken around me…. I live like a stranger who has adapted to a foreign country; the natives love me, and I love them too; I zealously work for their benefit … yet I feel I am a stranger, and I secretly yearn for the fields of my homeland.”3079 After this confession of Gershenzon, it is appropriate to formulate the key thesis of this chapter. There are different types of assimilation: civil and domestic assimilation, when the assimilated individual is completely immersed in the surrounding life and accepts the interests of the native nation (in that sense, the overwhelming majority of Russian, European and American Jews would perhaps consider themselves assimilated); cultural assimilation; and, at the extreme, spiritual assimilation, which also happens, albeit rarely. The latter is more complex and does not result from the former two types of assimilation. (In the opinion of a critic, The Correspondence between Two Corners by Vyacheslav Ivanov and M.O. Gershenzon, that “small book of tremendous importance”, serves as “a proof of the inadequacy of Jewish assimilation, even in the case of apparently complete cultural assimilation.”3080) Or take another individual, [M. Krol], a revolutionary in his youth and a “converted” émigré after the revolution, he marvels that the Russian Jews even in their new countries of emigration demonstrated “a huge amount of national energy” and were building an “original Jewish culture” there. Even in London the Jews had their own Yiddish schools, their own social organizations, and
3077Vl. Jabotinsky. Chetyre statyi o “chirikovskom intsidente” [Four Articles on the “Chirikov Incident”] (1909) // Ibid., p. 76. 3078TJE, V. 4, p. 560, 566-568. 3079Vyacheslav Ivanov, M.O. Gershenzon. Perepiska iz dvukh uglov [The Correspondence Between The Two Corners]. Petrograd: Alkonost, 1921, p. 60, 61. 3080O. Rapoport. Simptomy odnoy bolezni [The Symptoms of One Disease] // “22”, 1978, (1), p. 123.
their own solid economics; they did not merge with the English way of life, but only accommodated to its demands and reinforced the original English Jewry. (The latter even had their own British Council of Jews, and called themselves the “Jewish community of the Great Britain” — note that all this was in England, where Jewish assimilation was considered all but complete.) He witnessed the same thing in France, and was particularly impressed by the similar “feat” in the United States.3081 And there is also that unfailing and reliable Jewish mutual support, that truly outstanding ability that preserves the Jewish people. Yet it further weakens the stability of assimilation. It was not only the rise of Zionism that prompted the Jews to reject assimilation. The very course of the 20th century was not conductive to assimilation. On the eve of World War II in 1939, a true Zionist, Max Brod, wrote: “It was possible to argue in support of the theory of assimilation in the days of far less advanced statehood of the 19th century,” but “this theory lost any meaning in the era when the peoples increasingly consolidate”; “we, the Jews, will be inevitably crushed by bellicose nationalistic peoples, unless we take our fate into our hands and retreat in time.”3082 Martin Buber had a very stern opinion on this in 1941: “So far, our existence had served only to shake the thrones of idols, but not to erect the throne of God. This is exactly why our existence among other nations is so mysterious. We purport to teach others about the absolute, but in reality we just say ‘no’ to other nations, or, perhaps, we are actually nothing more than just the embodiment of such negation. This is why we have turned into the nightmare of the nations.”3083 Then, two deep furrows, the Catastrophe and the emergence of Israel soon afterwards, crossed the course of Jewish history, shedding new and very bright light on the problem of assimilation. Arthur Koestler clearly formulated and expressed his thoughts on the significance of the state of Israel for world Jewry in his book Promise and Fulfillment: Palestine 1917-1949 and in an article, Judah at the Crossroads. An ardent Zionist in his youth, Koestler left Vienna for a Palestinian kibbutz in 1926; he worked for a few years in Jerusalem as a Hebrew-writing columnist for Jabotinsky’s newspaper; he also reported for several German newspapers. And then he wrote: “If we exclude from the Jewish religion the mystical craving for the Promised Land, then the very basis and essence of this religion would disappear.” And further, “after the restoration of the Jewish state, most of the Jewish prayers, rites and symbols lost their meaning…. The God of 3081M. Krol. Natsionalizm i assimilyatsiya v evreyskoy istorii [Nationalism and Assimilation in the Jewish History] // JW-1, p. 191-193. 3082Max Brod. Lyubov’ na rasstoyanii [Love at a Distance] // EW, Tel-Aviv, 1976, (11), p. 198199. 3083Martin Buber. Natsionalnye bogi i Bog Izrailya [The National Gods and the God of Israel] // EW, Tel-Aviv, 1976, (4), p. 117.
Israel has abided by the treaty; he had returned the land of Canaan to Abraham’s seed…. If, however, [the religious Jew] defies the order to return to the land of his ancestors and thus violates the treaty, he consequently … anathematizes himself and loses his Jewishness.” On the other hand, it may be difficult for not very religious Jews to understand why they should make sacrifices to preserve “Jewish values” not included in the religious doctrine. “The [Jewish] religion loses any sense if you continue to pray about the return to Zion even after you have grimly determined not to go there.” A painful choice, yes, but “the choice that must be made immediately, for the sake of the next generation…. Do I want to move to Israel? If I do not, then what right do I have to continue calling myself a Jew and thus to mark my children with the stigma of isolation? The whole world would sincerely welcome the assimilation of the Jews,” and after three generations or so, “the Jewish question would fade away.”3084 The London newspaper Jewish Chronicle objected to Koestler: perhaps, “it is much better, much more reasonable and proper for a Jew from the Diaspora to live as before, at the same time helping to build the State of Israel?” Yet Koestler remained adamant: “They want both to have their cake and eat it. This is the route to disaster.”3085 Yet all previous attempts at assimilation ended in failure; so why it should be different this time? — argued the newspaper. Koestler replied: “Because all previous attempts of assimilation were based on the wrong assumption that the Jews could be adequate sons of the host nation, while at the same time preserving their religion and remaining ‘the Chosen people.’” But “ethnic assimilation is impossible if Judaism is preserved; and conversely Judaism collapses in case of ethnic assimilation. Jewish religion perpetuates the national isolation — there is nothing you can do about this fact.” Therefore, “before the restoration of Israel, the renunciation of one’s Jewish identity was equivalent to refusal to support the persecuted and could be regarded as a cowardly surrender.” But “now, we are talking not about surrender, but about a free choice.”3086 Thus, Koestler offered a tough choice to the Diaspora Jews: “to become Israelis or to stop being Jews. He himself took the latter path.”3087 (Needless to say, Jews in the Diaspora met Koestler’s conclusions mainly with angry criticism.) Yet those who had chosen the first option, the citizens of the State of Israel, obtained a new support and, from that, a new view at this eternal problem. For instance, a modern Israeli author writes sharply: “The Galut Jew is an immoral creature. He uses all the benefits of his host country but at the same time he does not fully identify with it. These people demand the status which no other 3084Artur Koestler. Iuda na pereputye [Judah at the Crossroads] // EW, Tel-Aviv, 1978, (33), p. 104-107, 110. 3085Ibid., p. 112. 3086Ibid., p. 117, 126. 3087V. Boguslavskiy. Galutu – s nadezhdoy [To the Galuth with Hope] // “22”, 1985, (40), p. 135.
nation in the world has — to be allowed to have two homelands: the one, where they currently live, and another one, where ‘their heart lives.’ And after that they still wonder why they are hated!”3088 And they do wonder a lot: “Why, why are the Jews so disliked (true, the Jews are disliked, this is fact; otherwise, why strive for liberation?)? And from what? Apparently, not from our Jewishness….” “We know very well that we should liberate ourselves, it is absolutely necessary, though … we still cannot tell exactly what from.”3089 A natural question — what should we do to be loved — is seldom asked. Jewish authors usually see the whole world as hostile to them, and so they give way to grief: “The world is now split into those who sympathize with the Jewish people, and those seeking to destroy the Jewish people.”3090 Sometimes, there is proud despair: “It is humiliating to rely on the authorities for the protection from the nation which dislikes you; it is humiliating to thank ingratiatingly the best and worthiest of this nation, who put in a good word for you.”3091 Another Israeli disagrees: “In reality, this world is not solely divided on the grounds of one’s attitude toward Jews, as we sometimes think owing to our excessive sensitivity.” A. Voronel agrees: “The Jews pay too much attention to anti-Semites, and too little — to themselves.”3092 Israel, the Jewish state, must become the center that secures the future of world Jewry. As early as in the 1920s no other than Albert Einstein wrote to no other than Pyotr Rutenberg, a former Social Revolutionary and possibly the main author of the revolutionary demands of January 9, 1905 (he accompanied Orthodox Father Gapon during the workers’ procession on that date but was later one of his executioners; still later, Rutenberg left Russia to rebuild Palestine): “First of all, your [Palestinian settlers’] lives must be protected, because you sacrifice yourselves for the sake of the Spirit and in the name the entire Jewish nation. We must demonstrate that we are a nation with the will to live and that we are strong enough for the great accomplishment that would consolidate our people and protect our future generations. For us and for our posterity, the State must become as precious as the Temple was for our ancestors.”3093
3088A.-B. Yoshua. Golos pisatelya [Voice of the Writer] // “22”, 1982, (27), p. 159. 3089Yu. Viner. Khochetsya osvoboditsya [I Want to Become Free] // “22”, 1983, (32), p. 204205. 3090M. Goldshteyn. Mysli vslukh [Thoughts Aloud] // Russkaya mysl [Russian Thinker], 1968, February 29, p. 5. 3091M. Kaganskaya. Nashe gostepriimstvo… [Our Hospitality…] // “22”, 1990, (70), p. 111. 3092A. Voronel’. Oglyanis’ v razdumye… [Look Back in Reflection]: [Round Table] // “22”, 1982, (24), p. 131. 3093A. Chernyak. Neizvestnoye pismo Einshteyna [The Unknown Letter of Einstein] // “22”, 1994, (92), p. 212.
Jewish authors support this conviction in many ways: “The Jewish problem, apparently, has no reliable solution without the Jewish state.”3094 ”Israel is the center that guarantees the future of the Jews of the whole world.”3095 Israel is the only correct place for Jews, one where their “historical activity does not result in historical fiasco.”3096 And only a rumble coming from that tiny and endlessly beleaguered country betrays “the phantom of the Catastrophe, permanently imprinted in the collective unconscious of the Israelis.”3097
And what is the  status of assimilation, the Diaspora, and Israel today? By the 1990s, assimilation had advanced very far. For example, “for 8090% of the American Jews, the modern tendencies of the Jewish life promise gradual assimilation.” This holds true not only for the United States: “Jewish life gradually disappears from most of the Diaspora communities.” Most modern-day Jews “do not have painful memories of the Catastrophe…. They identify with Israel much less than their parents.” Doubtlessly, “the role of the Diaspora is shrinking disastrously, and this is fraught with inevitable loss of its essential characteristics.” “Will our grandchildren remain Jews…? Will the Diaspora survive the end of this millennium and, if so,  for how long? Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, one of the greatest teachers of our time … warns that the Jews of the Diaspora are no longer a group, ‘whose survival is guaranteed by being in jeopardy.’” And because of that, they, paradoxically, “are already on the road to extinction, participating in the ‘Catastrophe of self-destruction.’” Moreover, “anti-Semitism in Western countries cannot be anymore considered as the element that strengthens Jewish identity. Anti-Semitic discrimination in politics, business, universities, private clubs, etc. is for all practical purposes eliminated.”3098 In present-day Europe “there are many Jews who do not identify as Jews and who react idiosyncratically to any attempt to connect them with that artificial community.” “The assimilated Jew does not want to feel like a Jew; he casts away the traits of his race (according to Sartre).”3099 The same author offers a scorching assessment: “European Jews reject their Jewishness; they think it is anti-Semitism that compels them to be the Jews. Yet that is a contradiction: A Jew identifies as a Jew only when he is in danger. Then he 3094A. Katsenelenboygen. Antisemitizm i evreyskoye gosudarstvo [Anti-Semitism and the Jewish State] // “22”, 1989, (64), p. 180. 3095I. Libler. Izrail — diaspora: Krizis identifikatsii [Israel — the Diaspora: The Crisis of Identification] // “22”, 1995, (95), p. 168. 3096N. Gutina. Dvusmyslennaya svyaz [An Ambiguous Connection] // “22”, 1981, (19), p. 124. 3097M. Kaganskaya. Mif protiv realnosti [Myth Against Reality] // “22”, 1988, (58), p. 141. 3098I. Libler. Izrail — diaspora… [Israel — the Diaspora…] // “22”, 1995, (95), p. 149-150, 154, 157. 3099Sonja Margolina. Das Ende der Lügen: Rußland und die Juden im 20. Jahrhundert. Berlin: Siedler Verlag, 1992, S. 95, 99.
escapes as a Jew. But when he himself becomes the source of danger, he is not a Jew.”3100 Thus, “the contours of the collapse of the Diaspora take shape exactly when the Western Jews enjoy freedom and wealth unprecedented in Jewish history, and when they are, or appear to be, stronger than ever.” And “if the current trends do not change, most of the Diaspora will simply disappear. We have to admit a real possibility of the humiliating, though voluntary, gradual degradation of the Diaspora…. Arthur Koestler, the advocate of assimilation, who in the 1950s predicted the death of the Diaspora, might prove to be right after all.”3101 Meanwhile, “the Jews of the world, sometimes even to their own surprise, feel like they are personally involved in the destiny of Israel.” “If, God forbid, Israel is destroyed, then the Jews in other countries will disappear too. I cannot explain why, but the Jews will not survive the second Catastrophe in this century.”3102 Another author attributes the “Jewish mythology of the imminent Catastrophe” precisely to life in the Diaspora, and this is why “American (and Soviet) Jews often express such opinions.” They prepare for the Catastrophe: should Israel fall, it will be they who will carry on the Jewish nation.3103 Thus, “almost all of many hypotheses attempting to explain the purpose of Jewish Diaspora … recognize that it makes Jewry nearly indestructible; it guarantees Jewry eternal life within the limits of the existence of mankind.”3104 We also encounter quite a bellicose defense of the principle of Diaspora. American professor Leonard Fayne said: “We oppose the historical demand to make aliyah. We do not feel like we are in exile.” In June 1994 “the President of the World Jewish Congress, Shoshana S. Cardin, aggressively announced to the Israelis: ‘We are not going to become the forage for aliyah to Israel, and we doubt you have any idea about the richness and harmony of American Jewish life.’”3105 Others state: “We are interesting for the peoples of the world not because of peculiarities of our statehood, but because of our Diaspora which is widely recognized as one of the greatest wonders of world history.”3106 Others are rather ironic: “One rogue came up with … the elegant excuse that the “choseness” of the Jews is allegedly nothing else but to be eternally scattered.”3107 “The miracle of the restoration of Israel post factum gave new
3100S. Margolina. Germaniya i evrei: vtoraya popytka [Germany and the Jews: The Second Attempt] // Strana i mir [The Country and the World], 1991, (3), p. 143. 3101I. Libler. Izrail — diaspora… [Israel – the Diaspora…] // “22”, 1995, (95), p. 150, 155. 3102N. Podgorets. Evreyi v sovremennom mire [The Jews in the Modern World]: [Interview] // EW, New York, 1985, (86), p. 113, 120 3103Z. Bar-Sella. Islamskiy fundamentalizm i evreyskoye gosudarstvo [Islamic Fundamentalism and the Jewish State] // “22”, 1988, (58), p. 182-184. 3104E. Fishteyn. Iz galuta s lyubovyu [From the Galuth with Love] // “22”, 1985, (40), p. 112. 3105I. Libler. Izrail – diaspora… [Israel — the Diaspora…] // “22”, 1995, (95), p. 152. 3106E. Fishteyn. Glyadim nazad my bez boyazni… [We Are Looking Back with No Fear] // “22”, 1984, No. 39, p. 135. 3107A. Voronel. Oglyanis’ v razdumye… [Look Back in Reflection]: [Round Table] // “22”, 1982, (24), p. 118.
meaning to the Diaspora; simultaneously, it had brilliantly concluded the story that could otherwise drag on. In short, it had crowned the miracle of the Diaspora. It crowned it, but did not abolish it.”3108 Yet “it is ironic too, as the goals for which we struggled so hard and which filled us with such pride and feeling of difference, are already achieved.”3109 Understanding the fate of the Diaspora and any successful prediction of its future largely depends on the issue of mixed marriages. Intermarriage is the most powerful and irreversible mechanism of assimilation. (It is no accident that such unions are so absolutely forbidden in the Old Testament: “They have dealt faithlessly with the Lord; for they have borne alien children.” (Hosea 5:7)) When Arnold J. Toynbee proposed intermarriage as a means to fight antiSemitism, hundreds of rabbis opposed him: “Mass mixed marriage means the end of Jewry.”3110 A dramatic growth of mixed marriages is observed in the Western countries: “Data documenting the statistics of ‘dissolution’ are chilling. In the 1960s ‘mixed marriages’ accounted for approximately 6% of Jewish marriages in the United States, the home of the largest Jewish community in the world. Today [in 1990s], only one generation later, this number reached 60% — a tenfold increase. The share of ‘mixed marriages’ in Europe and Latin America is approximately the same…. Moreover, apart from the orthodox Jews, almost all Jewish families in Western countries have an extremely low birth rate.” In addition, “only a small minority of children from ‘mixed families’ are willing to adopt a distinctly Jewish way of life.”3111 And what about Russia? The Shorter Jewish Encyclopedia provides the following statistics: in 1988 [still under the Soviet regime], in the RSFSR (Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic), 73% of married Jewish men, and 63% of married Jewish women had non-Jewish spouses (in 1978 these numbers were lower: 13% for men, and 20% for women.). “Actually, Jews in such marriages tend to lose their Jewish self-consciousness much faster; they more often identify themselves with other nationalities during census.”3112 Thus, almost everywhere, to a greater or lesser degree, we have the “erosion of Jewish life,” “dilution of racial, religious and ethnic borders that, until recently, served as the barriers for assimilation and `intermarriage.´” Today, “when common anti-Semitism declined so abruptly, … the Jews have lost a many great principles that in past used to be strong pillars of selfidentification.”3113
3108E. Fishteyn. Iz galuta s lyubovyu [From the Galuth with Love] // “22”, 1985, (40), p. 114. 3109I. Libler. Izrail — diaspora… [Israel –the Diaspora…] // “22”, 1995, (95), p. 156. 3110Ed Norden. Pereschityvaya evreyev* [Recounting the Jews] // “22”, 1991, (79), p. 126. 3111I. Libler. Izrail — diaspora… [Israel — the Diaspora…] // “22”, 1995, (95), p. 151, 152. 3112Kratkaya Evreyskaya Entsiklopediya [The Shorter Jewish Encyclopedia]: Jerusalem: Obshchestvo po issledovaniyu evreyskikh obshchin [Society for Study of Jewish Communities], 1996, V. 8, p. 303, Table 15. 3113I. Libler. Izrail — diaspora… [Israel — the Diaspora…] // “22”, 1995, (95), p. 156.
The Jews of the Diaspora are often attacked by the Israelis. Thirty and forty years after the creation of the State of Israel, the Israelis ask Diaspora Jews mockingly and sometimes angrily: “So, what about modern Jews? Most likely, they will always remain in their true historical home, in the Galuth.”3114 “The Algerian Jews had preferred France to Israel, and then the majority of the Iranian Jews, who left Khomeini’s rule, gave a wide berth to Israel.” “By pulling up stakes, they search for countries with higher standards of living, and a higher level of civilization. The love of Zion is not sufficient in itself.”3115 “The eternal image of a classical ‘imminent catastrophe’ does not attract the Jews to Israel anymore.”3116 “The Jews are a nation corrupted by their stateless and ahistoric existence.”3117 “The Jews did not pass the test. They still do not want to return to their homeland. They prefer to stay in Galut and complain about anti-Semitism every time they are criticized…. And nobody may say a bad word about Israel, because to criticize Israel is ‘anti-Semitism!’ If they are so concerned about Israel, why do they not move here to live? But no, this is exactly what they try to avoid!”3118 “Most of the Jews of the world have already decided that they do not want to be independent…. Look at the Russian Jews. Some of them wanted independence, while others preferred to continue the life of a mite on the Russian dog. And when the Russian dog had become somewhat sick and angry, they have turned to the American dog. After all, the Jews lived that way for two thousand years.”3119 And now, the the Diaspora Jew “is often nervous when confronted by an Israeli; he would rather feel guilty than … share his fate with Israel. This sense of inferiority is compensated by intensely maintaining his Jewish identity … through deliberate over-emphasizing of petty Jewish symbolism.” At the same time, “the Jew from the Diaspora alone shoulders the specific risk of confronting surrounding anti-Semitism.” Yet, “no matter how the Israel behaves, the Diaspora has no choice: it will quietly stand behind the Israelis like an unloved but faithful wife.”3120 It was forecasted that “by 2021, the Diaspora will probably shrink by another million souls.” “The interior workings of Jewish history… indicate that, most likely, the size of world Jewry will further decrease with the gradual concentration of a Jewish majority in Zion and not in the Diaspora.”3121
3114N. Gutina. Dvusmyslennaya svyaz [An Ambiguous Connection] // “22”, 1981, (19), p. 125. 3115S. Tsiryulnikov. Filosofiya evreyskoy anomalii [Philosophy of Jewish Anomaly] // EW, New York, 1984, (77), p. 148. 3116I. Libler. Izrail — diaspora… [Israel — the Diaspora…] // “22”, 1995, (95), p. 165. 3117Z. Bar-Sella. Islamskiy fundamentalizm i evreyskoye gosudarstvo [Islamic Fundamentalism and the Jewish State] // “22”, 1988, (58), p. 184. 3118A.-B. Yoshua. Golos pisatelya [Voice of the Writer] // “22”, 1982, (27), p. 158. 3119Beni Peled. Soglasheniye ne s tem partnyorom [Agreement with the Wrong Partner] // “22”, 1983, (30), p. 125. 3120E. Fishteyn. Iz galuta s lyubovyu [From the Galuth with Love] // “22”, 1985, (40), p. 115, 116.
Yet couldn’t it be the other way around? Maybe, after all, the Russian Jew Josef Bikerman was right when he confidently claimed that the Diaspora is indestructible? “I accept Galut, where we have lived for two thousand years, where we have developed strong cohesion, and where we must live henceforth, to live and prove ourselves.”3122 Could it be that those two voices which, according to Gershenzon, always sound in Jewish ears — one calling to mix with the surroundings, and another demanding to preserve Jewish national uniqueness, — will sound forever? A reputable historian noted (after World War II) “a paradox in the life of modern Jewry: ever-growing immersion of Jews in the life of other nations does not diminish their national identity and sometimes even intensifies it.”3123 Below are few testimonies made by Russian Jews during the Soviet (“internationalist”) period. “I always had an acute perception of my Jewishness…. From the age of 17, when I left the cradle of high school, I mixed in circles where the Jewish question was central.” “My father had a very strong Jewish spirit; despite that, he never observed traditions, Mitzvoth, did not know the language, and yet … everything, that he, a Jew, knew, was somehow subordinated to his Jewish identity.”3124 A writer from Odessa, Arkady Lvov, remembers: “When I was a 10-year old boy, I searched for the Jews among scientists, writers, politicians, and first of all, as a Young Pioneer [a communist youth group in the former Soviet Union], I looked for them among the members of government.” Lazar Kaganovich was in third place, ahead of Voroshilov and Kalinin, “and I was proud of Stalin’s minister Kaganovich… I was proud of Sverdlov, I was proud of Uritsky… And I was proud of Trotsky — yes, yes, of Trotsky!” He thought that Ostermann (the adviser of Peter the Great) was a Jew, and when he found that Ostermann actually was German, he had “a feeling of disappointment, a feeling of loss,” but he “was openly proud that Shafirov was a Jew.”3125 Yet there were many Jews in Russia who were not afraid “to merge with the bulk of the assimilating body,”3126 who devotedly espoused Russian culture: “In the old days, only a handful of Jews experienced this: Antokolsky, Levitan, Rubinstein, and a few others. Later there were more of them. Oh, they’ve fathomed Russia so deeply with their ancient and refined intuition of 3121Ed Norden. Pereschityvaya evreyev [Recounting the Jews] // “22”, 1991, (79), p. 120, 130-131. 3122I.M. Bikerman. K samopoznaniyu evreya [To the Self-Knowledge of a Jew]. Ibid., p. 62. 3123Sh. Ettinger. Noveyshiy period [Modern Period] // Istoriya evreyskogo naroda [History of the Jewish Nation] / Sh. Ettinger (Ed.). Jerusalem: Gesharim; Moscow: Mosty kultury [Bridges of Culture], 2001, p. 587. 3124A. Eterman. Tretye pokoleniye [The Third Generation] [Interview] // “22”, 1986, (47), p. 123-124. 3125A. Lvov. Vedi za soboy otsa svoyego [Lead the Way to Your Father] // EW, New York, 1980, (52), p. 183-184. 3126Vl. Jabotinsky. Na lozhnom puti [On the Wrong Road] // Vl. Jabotinsky. Felyetony [Feuilletons]. Ibid., p. 251.
heart and mind! They’ve perceived her shimmering, her enigmatic play of light and darkness, her struggles and sufferings. Russia attracted their hearts with her dramatic fight between good and evil, with her thunderstorms and weaknesses, with her strengths and charms. But several decades ago, not a mere handful, but thousands Jews entered Russian culture…. And many of them began to identify sincerely as Russians in their souls, thoughts, tastes and habits…. Yet there is still something in the Jewish soul … a sound, a dissonance, a small crack — something very small, but through it, eventually, distrust, mockery and hostility leaks from the outside, while from the inside some ancient memory works away. So who am I? Who am I? Am I Russian? No, no. I am a Russian Jew.”3127 Indeed, assimilation apparently has some insurmountable limits. That explains the difference between full spiritual assimilation and cultural assimilation, and all the more so, between the former and widespread civic and social assimilation. Jews — fatefully for Jewry — preserve their identity despite all outward signs of successful assimilation, they preserve “the inner Jewish character” (Solomon Lurie). The wish to fully merge with the rest of mankind, in spite of all strict barriers of the Law seems natural and vivid. But is it possible? Even in the 20th century some Jews believed that “the unification of the mankind is the ideal of Judaic Messianism.”3128 But is it really so? Did such an ideal ever exist? Far more often, we hear vigorous objections to it: “Nobody will convince or compel me to renounce my Jewish point of view, or to sacrifice my Jewish interests for the sake of some universal idea, be it ‘proletarian internationalism,’ (the one we idiots believed in the 1920s) or ‘Great Russia,’ or ‘the triumph of Christianity,’ or ‘the benefit of all mankind,’ and so on.”3129 Nearly assimilated non-Zionist and non-religious Jewish intellectuals often demonstrate a totally different attitude. For instance, one highly educated woman with broad political interests, T.M.L., imparted to me in Moscow in 1967 that “it would be horrible to live in an entirely Jewish milieu. The most precious trait of our nation is cosmopolitanism. It would be horrible if all Jews would gather in one militarist state. It is totally incomprehensible for assimilated Jews.” I objected timidly: “But it cannot be a problem for the assimilated Jews as they are not Jews anymore.” She replied: “No, we still have some [Jewish] genes in us.” Yet it is not about the fatality of origin, blood or genes, it is about which pain — Jewish pain or that of the host nation — is closer to one’s heart. “Alas, nationality is more than just knowledge of language, or an introduction to the culture, or even an attachment to the nature and way of life of the country. There is another dimension in it — that of the commonality of historic destiny, 3127Rani Aren. V russkom galute [In the Russian Galuth] // “22”, 1981, (19), p. 135-136. 3128G.B. Sliozberg. Dela minuvshikh dney: Zapiski russkogo evreya [The Things of Days Bygone: The Memoirs of a Russian Jew]: 3 volumes. Paris, 1933-1934, V. 1, p. 4. 3129Sh. Markish. Eshchyo raz o nenavisti k samomu sebe [Once Again on the Hate to Yourself] // “22”, 1980, (16), p. 189.
determined for each individual by his involvement in the history and destiny of his own people. While for others this involvement is predetermined by birth, for the Jew it is largely a question of personal choice, that of a hard choice.”3130 So far, assimilation has not been very convincing. All those who proposed various ways for universal assimilation have failed. The difficult problem of assimilation persists. And though on a global scale the process of assimilation has advanced very far, it by no means foredooms the Diaspora. “Even Soviet life could not produce a fully assimilated Jew, the one who would be assimilated at the deepest, psychological level.”3131 And, as a Jewish author concludes, “Wherever you look, you will find insoluble Jewish residue in the assimilated liquid.”3132 Yet individual cases of deep assimilation with bright life histories do occur. And we in Russia welcome them wholeheartedly.
“A Russian Jew … A Jew, a Russian…. So much blood and tears have been shed around this boundary, so much unspeakable torment with no end in sight piled up. Yet, at the same time, we have also witnessed much joy of spiritual and cultural growth…. There were and still are numerous Jews who decide to shoulder that heavy cross: to be a Russian Jew, and at the same time, a Russian. Two affections, two passions, two struggles…. Isn’t it too much for one heart? Yes, it is too much. But this is exactly where the fatal tragedy of this dual identity is. Dual identity is not really an identity. The balance here is not an innate but rather an acquired entity.”3133 That reflection on the pre-revolutionary Russia was written in 1927 in the Paris emigration. Some fifty years later, another Jew, who lived in Soviet Russia and later emigrated to Israel, looked back and wrote: “We, the Jews who grew up in Russia, are a weird cross — the Russian Jews…. Others say that we are Jews by nationality and Russians by culture. Yet is it possible to change your culture and nationality like a garment…? When an enormous press drives one metal into another, they cannot be separated, not even by cutting. For decades we were pressed together under a huge pressure. My national identity is expressed in my culture. My culture coalesced with my nationality. Please separate one from another. I am also curious which cells of my soul are of the Russian color and which are of the Jewish one. Yet there was not only pressure, not only a forced fusion. There was also an unexpected affinity between these intercrossing
3130L. Tsigelman-Dymerskaya. Sovetskiy antisemitizm — prichiny i prognozy [Soviet AntiSemitism — Causes and Forecasts]: [Seminar] // “22”, 1978, (3), p. 175. 3131Yu. Shtern. Dvoynaya otvetstvennost [Double Responsibility] // “22”, 1981, (21), p. 127. 3132O. Rapoport. Simptomy odnoy bolezni [Symptoms of One Disease] // “22”, 1978, (1), p. 123. 3133St. Ivanovich. Semyon Yushkevich i evreyi [Semyon Yushkevich and the Jews] / Publikatsiya Ed. Kapitaykina [Publication of Ed. Kapitaykin] // Evrei v kul’ture Russkogo Zarubezhya [The Jews in the Russian-Language Culture]. Jerusalem, 1992, V. 1, p. 29.
origins, at some deep spiritual layers. It was as if they supplemented each other to a new completeness: like space supplements time, the spiritual breadth supplements the spiritual depth, and the acceptance supplements the negation; and there was a mutual jealousy about `choseness´. Therefore, I do not have two souls, which quarrel with each other, weaken each other, and split me in two. I have one soul … and it is not two-faced, not divided in two, and not mixed. It is just one.”3134 And the response from Russia: “I believe that the contact of the Jewish and Slavic souls in Russia was not a coincidence; there was some purpose in it.”3135
3134[R. Nudelman] Kolonka redaktora [Editor’s Column] // “22”, 1979, (7), p. 95-96. 3135L-skiy. Pisma iz Rossii [Letters from Russia] // “22”, 1981, (21), p. 150.
Author’s afterword
In 1990, while finishing April 1917 and sorting out the enormous amount of material not included in The Red Wheel, I decided to present some of that material in the form of a historical essay about Jews in the Russian revolution. Yet it became clear almost immediately that in order to understand those events the essay must step back in time. Thus, it stepped back to the very first incorporation of the Jews into the Russian Empire in 1772. On the other hand, the revolution of 1917 provided a powerful impetus to Russian Jewry, so the essay naturally stretched into the post-revolutionary period. Thus, the title Two Hundred Years Together was born. However, it took time for me to realize the importance of that distinct historical boundary drawn by mass emigration of the Jews from the Soviet Union that had begun in the 1970s (exactly 200 years after the Jews appeared in Russia) and which had become unrestricted by 1987. This boundary had been abolished, so that for the first time, the non-voluntary status of the Russian Jews no longer a fact: they ought not to live here anymore; Israel waits for them; all countries of the world are open to them. This clear boundary changed my intention to keep the narrative up to the mid-1990s, because the message of the book was already played out: the uniqueness of Russian-Jewish entwinement disappeared at the moment of the new Exodus. Now, a totally new period in the history of the by-now-free Russian Jewry and its relations with the new Russia began. This period started with swift and essential changes, but it is still too early to predict its long-term outcomes and judge whether its peculiar Russian-Jewish character will persevere or it will be supplanted with the universal laws of the Jewish Diaspora. To follow the evolution of this new development is beyond the lifespan of this author.