History of the Jews in Russia and the Soviet Union
Categories: Articles to be expanded | Jewish Russian and Soviet history | Religion in Russia | History of Russia
Contents |
Early History
Tradition places Jews in southern Russia, Armenia, and Georgia since before the days of the First Temple, and records exist from the fourth century showing that there were Armenian cities possessing Jewish populations ranging from 10,000 to 30,000 along with substantial Jewish settlements in the Crimea. Under the influence of these Jewish communities Bulan, the "Khaghan" of the Khazars, and the ruling classes of Khazaria adopted Judaism in 731 or 740. After the overthrow of the Khazarian kingdom by Sviatoslav I of Kiev (969), Jews in large numbers fled to the Crimea, the Caucasus, and the Russian principality Of Kiev, formerly a part of the Khazar territory. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries the Jews occupied in Kiev a separate quarter, called the Jewish town ("Zhidy"), the gates leading to which were known as the Jewish gates ("Zhidovskiye vorota"). At this time Jews are found also in northeastern Russia, in the domains of Prince Andrei Bogolyubsky (1169-1174).
Documentary evidence as to the presence of Jews in Muscovite Russia is first found in the chronicles of 1471. The relatively small population of Jews were generally free of major persecution: although there were laws against them during this period, they do not appear to be strictly enforced. Muscovite treatment of the Jews became harsher in the reign of Ivan IV., The Terrible (1533-84). For example, in his conquest of Polotsk, Ivan IV. ordered that all Jews who should decline to adopt Christianity should be drowned in the Düna.
Though Russia had few Jews, countries just to its west had rapidly growing Jewish populations, as waves of anti-Jewish pogroms and expulsions from the countries of Western Europe marked the last centuries of the Middle Ages, a sizable portion of the Jewish populations there moved to the more tolerant countries of Central and Eastern Europe, as well as the Middle East. Many settled in Poland (later Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth) and Hungary (later Austria-Hungary). In turn, Jews from Poland moved in large numbers to the lightly populated areas of Ukraine and Lithuania, which were to become part of the expanding Russian empire.
During this period, in the shtetls populated almost entirely by Jews, or in the middle-sized town where Jews constituted a significant part of population, Jewish communities traditionally ruled themselves according to halakha, and were limited by the privileges granted them by local rulers. (See also Shtadlan). These Jews were not assimilated into the larger eastern European societies, and identified as an ethnic group with a unique set of religious beliefs and practices.
Tsarist Russia (1480s-1917)
In the 1480s the principality of Muscovy became the religious equivalent of the Caliphate or Holy Roman Empire. Based on the theory of the Third Rome, it was believed that the Tsar ruled the only rightful, practically independent Orthodox state, surrounded by Muslim and Roman Catholic infidels. According to prophecy, there were to be only three Romes, that is, centers of rightful religious faith. The first two, ancient Rome and Constantinople, have already fallen, leaving the only hope on earth with Moscow.
The religious zeal of such a theory reasoned for the ultimate measures against enemies of the faith, including the Jews. Jews were not tolerated in the area of Muscovy, from 1721 the official doctrine of Imperial Russia was openly anti-Semitic. When the Russian army captured a Polish town, as happened in 1563 when Polotsk, a large center of trade in Lithuania was captured, captured Jews were murdered at once. Even if Jews were tolerated for some modest time, eventually they were expelled, as when the captured part of Ukraine was cleared of Jews in the year 1727. These policies made Muscovite Russia a very hostile environment for Jewish people.
See also Chmielnicki Uprising
Pogroms and the Pale of Settlement
The traditional measures of keeping Russia free of Jews failed when the main territory of Poland was annexed during the partitions. During the second (1793) and the third (1795) partitions, large populations of Jews were taken over by Russia, and the Tsar established a Pale of Settlement that included Poland and Crimea. Jews were supposed to remain in the Pale and required special permission to move to Russia proper, while Russian officials pursued alternating policies designed to encourage assimiliation (such as opening public schools to Jews) and destroy independent Jewish life (such as forbidding Jews to live in certain towns).
Rebellions beginning with the Decembrist Revolt of 1825, followed by the struggle of Russia's intelligentsia, and the rise of nihilism, liberalism, socialism, syndicalism, and finally Communism threatened the old tsarist order. Assuming that many radicals were of Jewish extraction, tsarist officials increasingly resorted to popularizing religious and nationalistic fanaticism.
Alexander II, known as the "Tsar liberator" for the 1861 abolition of serfdom in Russia, was also known for his suppression of national minorities. Nevertheless, he approved the policy of Polish politician Alexander Wielopolski in the Kingdom of Poland that gave Jews equal rights to other citizens (the prior status of Jews was different; it is questionable whether this distinct status was more or less beneficial). Alexander III was a staunch reactionary who strictly adhered to the old maxim "Autocracy, Orthodoxy, and Nationalism." His escalation of anti-Semitism sought to popularize "folk anti-Semitism," which portrayed the Jews as "Christ-killers" and the oppressors of the Slavic, Christian victims.
A large-scale wave of anti-Jewish pogroms swept southern Russia in 1881, after Jews were wrongly blamed for the assassination of Alexander II. In the 1881 outbreak, there were pogroms in 166 Russian towns, thousands of Jewish homes were destroyed, many families reduced to extremes of poverty; women sexually assaulted, and large numbers of men, women, and children killed or injured. The new czar, Alexander III, blamed the Jews for the riots and on May 15, 1882 introduced the so-called Temporary Regulations ("Временные правила") that stayed in effect for more than thirty years and came to be known as the May Laws.
The procurator-general of the Holy Synod and the tsar's mentor, friend, and adviser Konstantin Pobedonostsev was reported as saying that one-third of Russia's Jews was expected to emigrate, one-third to accept baptism, and one-third to starve. [1] The respressive legislation was repeatedly revised. Many historians noted the concurrence of these state-enforced anti-Semitic policies with waves of pogroms[2] that continued until 1884, with at least tacit government knowledge and in some cases policemen were seen inciting or joining the mob.
The systematic policy of discrimination banned Jews from rural areas and towns of less than ten thousand people, even within the Pale, assuring the slow death of many shtetls. In 1887, the quotas placed on the number of Jews allowed into secondary and higher education were tightened down to 10% within the Pale, 5% outside the Pale, except Moscow and St. Petersburg, held at 3%. Strict restrictions prohibited Jews from practicing many professions. In 1886, an Edict of Expulsion was enforced on Jews of Kiev. In 1891, Moscow was cleansed of its Jews (except few deemed useful) and a newly built synagogue was closed by the city's authorities headed by the Tsar's brother. Tsar Alexander III refused to curtail repressive practices and reportedly noted: "But we must never forget that the Jews have crucified our Master and have shed his precious blood." [3]
In 1892, new measures banned Jewish participation in local elections despite their large numbers in many towns of the Pale. "The Town Regulations prohibited Jews from the right to elect or be elected to town Dumas… That way, reverse proportional representation was achieved: the majority of town's taxpayers had to be subjugated to minority governing the town against Jewish interests." [4]
The persecutions provided the impetus for mass emigration and political activism among Russian Jews. More than two million of them fled Russia between 1880 and 1920. While vast majority emigrated to the United States, some turned to Zionism. In 1882, members of Bilu and Hovevei Zion made what came to be known the First Aliyah to Palestine, then a part of the Ottoman Empire.
The Tsarist government sporadically encouraged Jewish emigration. In 1890, it approved the establishment of "The Society for the Support of Jewish Farmers and Artisans in Syria and Eretz Israel," (known as the "Odessa Committee" headed by Leon Pinsker) dedicated to practical aspects in establishing agricultural Jewish settlements in the Land of Israel.
An even bloodier wave of pogroms broke out in 1903-1906, leaving an estimated 2,000 Jews dead, and many more wounded. At least some of the pogroms are believed to have been organized or supported by the Tsarist Russian secret police, the Okhranka.
Even more pogroms accompanied the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the ensuing Russian Civil War, when an estimated 70,000 to 250,000 civilian Jews were killed in atrocities throughout the former Russian Empire; the number of Jewish orphans exceeded 300,000. In his book 200 Years Together, Russian historian Alexander Solzhenitsyn provides the following numbers from Nahum Gergel's 1951 study of the pogroms in the Ukraine during 1917-1918: out of estimated 887 mass pogroms, about 40% were perpetrated by the Ukrainian forces led by Symon Petliura, 25% by the Green Army and various nationalist and anarchist gangs, 17% by the White Army, especially forces of Anton Denikin, and 8.5% by the Red Army.
See also Cantonist, Kishinev pogrom, Beilis trial
After the October Revolution (1917-1991)
Jews and Bolshevism
Many members of the Bolshevik party were ethnically Jewish, especially in the leadership of the party, and the percentage of Jewish party members among the rival Mensheviks was even higher. The idea of overthrowing the Tsarist regime was attractive to many members of the Jewish intelligentsia because of the oppression of non-Russian nations within the Russian Empire. For much the same reason, many other non-Russians, notably Latvians or Poles, were disproportionately represented in the party leadership. This fact was abused by the Tsarist secret police, the Okhranka, which used anti-Semitism and xenophobia as a weapon against the Russian revolutionary movement and promulgated fraudulent Protocols of the Elders of Zion to explain Russian revolutions as a part of a powerful world conspiracy.
The Jewish origins of some of leading Bolsheviks and their support for a policy of promoting international proletarian revolution—most notably in the case of Trotsky—led many enemies of Bolshevism to draw a picture of Communism as a political idea pursued to benefit Jewish interests. In Germany, the Nazi regime of Adolf Hitler used this theory to paint a picture of a supposed "Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy". Even today, many anti-Semites continue to promote the idea of a link between Judaism and Communism. However, the concept that an entire ethnic group can be held responsible for the actions of a few is very widely rejected. The Bolsheviks seem to have been personally rather atheistic and internationalistic, more concerned with the plight of the working class in general rather than with any ethnic or religious group. (See proletarian internationalism, bourgeois nationalism).
Soon after seizing power, the Bolsheviks established the Yevsektsiya, the Jewish section of the Communist party in order to destroy the rival Bund and Zionist parties, suppress Judaism and replace traditional Jewish culture with "proletarian culture".
Most of the Jewish Old Bolsheviks, including members of Yevsektsiya, along with their Gentile counterparts, were purged by Stalin during the 1930s.
Under Lenin (1917-1924)
One of Lenin's first state addresses was to mark the "emancipation of Jews" from Tsarism. Lenin delivered a state address "on the pogrom slandering of the Jews" on a gramophone disc following the October Revolution. It was not carried by any Russian newspaper, or widely heard; only a few thousand Russians had gramophones. Lenin formally issued a proclamation granting freedom to worship to the Russian proletariat and officially abolished the Pale of Settlement.
Lenin sought to explain the phenomenon of anti-Semitism in Marxist terms. According to Lenin, anti-Semitism was an "attempt to divert the hatred of the workers and peasants from the exploiters toward the Jews." Linking anti-Semitism to class struggle, he argued that it was merely a political technique used by the tsar to exploit religious fanaticism, popularize the despotic, unpopular regime, and divert popular anger toward a scapegoat. The Soviet Union also officially maintained this Marxist-Leninist interpretation under Stalin, who expounded Lenin's critique of anti-Semitism. However, this did not prevent the widely publicized repressions of Jewish intellectuals during 1948–1953 (see the rootless cosmopolitan article).
Such actions, along with extensive Jewish participation among the Bolsheviks, plagued the Communists during the Russian Civil War against the Whites with a reputation of being "a gang of marauding Jews"; Jews were a plurality ethnicity in the Communist Central Committee, which had a non-Russian majority. The vast majority of Russia's Jews weren't in any political party.
Lenin initiated repressions against the Jewish Labor Bund in order to consolidate Bolshevik influence over all other leftwing and labor movements. The attempts of the Bund to be the sole representative of the Jewish worker conflicted with Lenin's universal coalition of workers of all nationalities. The outcome, however, was less detrimental than repression of Zionism since most Bund members readily joined the Bolsheviks, and later merged with the Communist Party. The movement did split in three; the Bundist identity survived in interwar Poland under Rafael Abramovich, while more westernized Jews joined the Mensheviks. The prohibition of the Bund was the first example of the drawbacks of Communist anti-nationalism, depriving Jews of a powerful, autonomous interest and paramilitary group.
In 1921, a large number of Jews opted for Poland, as they were entitled by peace treaty in Riga to choose the country they preferred. Several hundred thousand, despite the prospect of Communist paradise and the popular vision of Soviet Russia as ruled by Jews, joined the already numerous Jewish population of Poland.
Under Stalin (1922-1953)
To offset Jewish national and religious aspirations, an alternative to the Land of Israel was established in 1928. The Jewish Autonomous Oblast with the center in Birobidzhan in the Russian Far East was to become a "Soviet Zion". Yiddish, rather than "reactionary" Hebrew, would be the national language, and proletarian socialist literature and arts would replace Judaism as the quintessence of culture. Despite a massive domestic and international state propaganda campaign, the Jewish population there never reached 30% (as of 2003 it was only about 1.2%). The experiment ground to a halt in the mid-1930s, during Stalin's first campaign of purges. Jewish leaders were arrested and executed, and Yiddish schools were shut down.
Stalin's letter "Anti-Semitism: Reply to an Inquiry of the Jewish News Agency in the United States" dated January 12, 1931 indicated his official position:
- In answer to your inquiry: National and racial chauvinism is a vestige of the misanthropic customs characteristic of the period of cannibalism. Anti-semitism, as an extreme form of racial chauvinism, is the most dangerous vestige of cannibalism.
- Anti-semitism is of advantage to the exploiters as a lightning conductor that deflects the blows aimed by the working people at capitalism. Anti-semitism is dangerous for the working people as being a false path that leads them off the right road and lands them in the jungle. Hence Communists, as consistent internationalists, cannot but be irreconcilable, sworn enemies of anti-semitism.
- In the U.S.S.R. anti-semitism is punishable with the utmost severity of the law as a phenomenon deeply hostile to the Soviet system. Under U.S.S.R. law active anti-semites are liable to the death penalty. [5]
In 1936 Pravda, the party's newspaper and main propaganda organ, printed a beneficial explanation of the vile nature of anti-Semitism. It stated that "national and racial chauvinism is a survival of the barbarous practices of the cannibalistic period... it served the exploiters... to protect capitalism from the attack of the working class; anti-Semitism, a phenomenon profoundly hostile to the Soviet Union, is repressed in the USSR."
Despite its official opposition to anti-Semitism, critics of the USSR condemn it as anti-Semitic regime due to the Non-Aggression Pact with Nazi Germany, high Jewish casualties in the Great Purges, Soviet anti-Zionism, its hostility toward Jewish religious and cultural institutions, Stalin's documented anti-Jewish bias, the refusal to grant Jewish emigration to Israel, and Soviet tendency to lean pro-Arab. Each of these aspects of Soviet rule taint Soviet history in the West.
The Non-Aggression Pact, for instance, creates suspicion regarding the Soviet Union's position toward Jews. The pact, which arguably allowed Hitler to freely enter Poland, the nation with the world's largest Jewish population, was not an acceptance of Nazism, but a realization that the Soviet Union was unable to win a war against its ideological arch enemy in 1939.
The Great Purges are also popularly portrayed as anti-Semitic in the West, thereby ignoring the actual context of Stalin's consolidation of power. A number of the most prominent victims of the Purges—Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev, to name a few—were ethnic Jews. That is, however, an oversimplification, since Stalin was just as brutal when acting against his real or imagined enemies who were not Jewish—e.g., Bukharin, Tukhachevsky, Kirov, and Ordzhonikidze. The number of prominent Jewish Old Bolsheviks killed in the purge reflects the fact that Jews were the largest group in the Central Committee, which had a non-Russian majority, and that Jews had a high participation among the Bolsheviks.
In addition, some Stalinists survived notwithstanding their Jewish heritage. Stalin did not purge Lazar Kaganovich, a loyal supporter who came to Stalin's attention in the 1920s as a successful bureaucrat in Tashkent, who aided Stalin and Molotov against Kirov and who participated in his brutal elimination of rivals in the 1930s. Kaganovich's loyalty endured after Stalin's death, when his opposition to de-Stalinization caused him to be expelled from the party in 1957, along with Molotov.
In January 1948 Solomon Mikhoels, a popular actor-director of the Moscow State Jewish Theater and the chairman of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, was killed in a suspicious car accident.[6] Mass arrests of prominent Jewish intellectuals and suppression of Jewish culture followed under the banners of campaign against "rootless cosmopolitans" and anti-Zionism. At least thirteen prominent Yiddish writers were executed on August 12 1952, among them Peretz Markish, Leib Kwitko, David Hoffstein, Itzik Feffer, David Bergelson, Der Nister in the event known as "The Night of Murdered Poets" ("Ночь казненных поэтов"). In the 1955 UN Assembly's session a high Soviet official still denied the "rumors" about their disappearance.
The so-called Doctors' plot of 1953 was a deliberately anti-Semitic policy: Stalin targeted "corrupt Jewish bourgeois nationalists," eschewing the usual code words like "cosmopolitans." Stalin died, however, before this next wave of arrests and executions could be launched in earnest. A number of historians claim that the Doctors' plot was intended as the opening of a campaign that would have resulted in the mass deportation of Soviet Jews had Stalin not died on March 5, 1953. Days after Stalin's death the plot was declared a hoax by the Soviet government.
These cases may have reflected Stalin's paranoia, rather than state ideology — a distinction that, of course, made no practical difference as long as Stalin was alive, but which became salient on his death.
Beyond longstanding controversies, ranging from the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact to anti-Zionism, the Soviet Union did grant official "equality of all citizens regardless of status, sex, race, religion, and nationality." The years before the Holocaust were an era of rapid change for Soviet Jews, leaving behind the dreadful poverty of the Pale of Settlement. Forty percent of the population in the former Pale left for large cities within the USSR.
Emphasis on education and movement from countryside shtetls to newly industrialized cities allowed many Soviet Jews to enjoy overall advances under Stalin and to become one of the most educated population groups in the world.
On the eve of the Holocaust
Due to Stalinist emphasis on its urban population, interwar migration inadvertently rescued countless Soviet Jews; Nazi Germany penetrated the entire former Jewish Pale—but were kilometers short of Leningrad and Moscow. The great wave of deportations from the areas annexed by Soviet Union according to the Nazi-Soviet pact, often seen by victims as genocide, paradoxically also saved lives of a few hundred thousand Jewish deportees. However horrible their conditions, the fate of Jews in Nazi Germany was much worse. The migration of many Jews deeper East from the part of the Jewish Pale that would become occupied by Germany saved at least forty percent of this area's Jewish population.
The Holocaust
- Main article: The Holocaust
Over two million Soviet Jews died during the Holocaust, second only to the number of Polish Jews who fell victim to Hitler. Even before the mass deportations to the death camps in 1942, German death squads, the Einsatzkommandos, shot hundreds of thousands of Jews throughout 1941. Among some of the larger massacres in 1941 were: 33,771 Jews of Kiev shot in ditches at Babi Yar; 100,000 Jews of Vilna killed in the forests of Ponary, 36,000 Jews machine-gunned in Odessa, 25,000 Jews of Riga killed in the woods at Rumbula, and 10,000 Jews slaughtered in Simferopol in the Crimea. Though mass shootings continued through 1942, most notably 16,000 Jews shot at Pinsk, Jews were increasingly shipped to concentration camps in Poland.
Local residents of German-occupied areas, especially Ukrainians, Lithuanians, and Latvians, often played key roles in the Holocaust. Ukrainian and Latvian police carried out deportations in the Warsaw Ghetto, and Lithuanian police marched Jews to their death at Ponary. Even as some assisted the Germans, many individuals in the territories under German control also helped Jews escape death, see Righteous Among the Nations.
Over 200,000 Jews were also killed in battle fighting in the Red Army against the Nazis.
Soviet reaction to the Holocaust
The typical Soviet policy regarding the Holocaust was to present it as atrocites against Soviet citizens, not acknowledging the genocide of the Jews. For example, after the liberation of Kiev from the Nazi occupation in 1943, the Extraordinary State Commission (Чрезвычайная Государственная Комиссия) was set out to investigate Nazi crimes and its first report was ready by December 25, 1943. It contained (a preserved copy exists) the following sentence:
- "The Hitlerist bandits committed mass murder of the Jewish population. They announced that on September 29, 1941, all the Jews were required to arrive to the corner of Melnikov and Dokterev streets and bring their documents, money and valuables. The butchers marched them to Babi Yar, took away their belongings, then shot them."
The officially censored version of the text was:
- "The Hitlerist bandits brought thousands of civilians to the corner of Melnikov and Dokterev streets. The butchers marched them to Babi Yar, took away their belongings, then shot them." [7]
See also Vasily Grossman, Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, Black Book
After Stalin
In April 1956, the Warsaw Yiddish language Jewish newspaper Folkshtimme published sensational long lists of Soviet Jews who had perished before and after the Holocaust. The world press began demanding answers from Soviet leaders, as well as inquire about current condition of Jewish education system and culture. The same fall, a group of leading Jewish world figures publicly requested the heads of Soviet state to clarify the situation. Since no cohesive answer was received, their concern was only heightened. The fate of Soviet Jews emerged as a major human rights issue in the West.
The Soviet Union and Zionism
Marxist anti-nationalism and anti-clericalism had a mixed effect on Soviet Jews. Jews were the immediate benefactors, but long-term victims, of the Marxist notion that any manifestation of nationalism is "socially retrogressive." On one hand, Jews were liberated from the religious persecution of the Tsarist years of "autocracy, nationalism, and Orthodoxy." On the other, this notion was threatening to Jewish cultural institutions, the Bund, Jewish autonomy, Judaism and Zionism.
Political Zionism was officially stamped out for the entire history of the Soviet Union as a form of bourgeois nationalism. Although Leninism emphasizes "self-determination," this did not make the state more accepting of Zionism. Leninism defines self-determination by territory, not culture, which allowed Soviet minorities to have separate oblasts, autonomous regions, or republics, which were nonetheless symbolic until its later years. Jews, however, did not fit such a theoretical model; Jews in the Diaspora did not even have an agricultural base, as Stalin often asserted when attempting to deny the existence of a Jewish nation, and certainly no territorial unit. Marxian notions even denied a Jewish identity beyond religion and caste; Marx defined Jews as a "chimerical nation."
Lenin, claiming to be deeply committed to egalitarian ideals and universality of all humanity, rejected Zionism as a reactionary movement, "bourgeois nationalism", "socially retrogressive", and a backward force that deprecates class divisions among Jews.
Moreover, Zionism entailed contact between Soviet citizens and westerners, which was dangerous in a closed society. Soviet authorities were likewise fearful of any mass-movement independent of monopolistic Communist Party, and not tied to the state or the ideology of Marxism-Leninism.
Without changing its official anti-Zionist stance, from late 1944 until 1948 Stalin had adopted a de facto pro-Zionist foreign policy, apparently believing that the new country would be socialist and would speed the decline of British influence in the Middle East.[8]
The USSR briefly supported the establishment of Israel. During the 1947 UN Partition Plan debate on May 14, 1947, the Soviet ambassador Andrei Gromyko announced:
- "As we know, the aspirations of a considerable part of the Jewish people are linked with the problem of Palestine and of its future administration. This fact scarcely requires proof... During the last war, the Jewish people underwent exceptional sorrow and suffering...
- The United Nations cannot and must not regard this situation with indifference, since this would be incompatible with the high principles proclaimed in its Charter...
- The fact that no Western European State has been able to ensure the defence of the elementary rights of the Jewish people and to safeguard it against the violence of the fascist executioners explains the aspirations of the Jews to establish their own State. It would be unjust not to take this into consideration and to deny the right of the Jewish people to realize this aspiration." [9]
This speech was not published in the Soviet media, tightly controlled by the state.
Soviet approval in the United Nations Security Council was critical to the UN partitioning of the British Mandate of Palestine, which led to the founding of the State of Israel. Three days after Israel declared independence, the Soviet Union legally recognized it de jure.
Effects of the Cold War
By the end of 1948 the USSR switched sides in the Arab-Israeli conflict and throughout the course of the Cold War unequivocally supported various Arab regimes against Israel. The official position of the Soviet Union and its satellite states and agencies was that Zionism was a tool used by the Jews and Americans for "racist imperialism".
As Israel was emerging as a close Western ally, the specter of Zionism raised fears of internal dissent and opposition. During the later parts of the Cold War Soviet Jews were persecuted as possible traitors, Western sympathisers, or a security liability. The Communist leadership closed down various Jewish organizations and declared Zionism an ideological enemy. The only exception were a few token synagogues. These synagogues were then placed under police surveillance, both openly and through the use of informers.
As a result of the persecution, both state-sponsored and unofficial anti-Semitism became deeply ingrained in the society and remained a fact for years: ordinary Soviet Jews often suffered hardships, epitomized by often not being allowed to enlist in universities or hired to work in certain professions. Many were barred from participation in the government, and had to bear being openly humiliated. Soviet media usually avoided using the word "Jew," and many felt compelled to hide their identities by changing their names.
See also rootless cosmopolitan, Doctors' plot, Zionology and Anti-Zionist committee of the Soviet public
The collapse of the Soviet Union and emigration to Israel
A mass emigration was politically undesirable for the Soviet regime. As increasing number of Soviet Jews applied to emigrate to Israel in the period following the 1967 Six Day War, many were formally refused permission to leave. A typical excuse given by the OVIR (ОВиР), the MVD department responsible for provisioning of exit visas was that the persons who had been given access at some point in their careers to information vital to Soviet national security could not be allowed to leave the country.
After the Dymshits-Kuznetsov hijacking affair in 1970 and the crackdown that followed, strong international condemnations caused the Soviet authorities to increase the emigration quota. In the years 1960-1970, the USSR left only 4,000 people; in the following decade, the number rose to 250,000 [10].
In 1972 the USSR imposed the so-called "diploma tax" on would-be emigrants who received higher education in the USSR. In some cases, the fee was as high as twenty annual salaries. This measure was apparently designed to combat the brain drain caused by growing emigration of the Soviet Jews and other members of intelligentsia to the West. After international protests, the Kremlin soon revoked the tax but sporadically imposed various limitations.
At first almost all of those who managed to get exit visas to Israel actually made aliyah, but after mid-1970s, many of those allowed to leave to Israel chose other destinations, most notably the US. In 1989 a record 71,000 Soviet Jews were granted exodus from the USSR, of whom only 12,117 immigrated to Israel. Since the dissolution of the USSR, over one million Soviet Jews have emigrated to Israel.
See also Jackson-Vanik amendment, "Russian" aliyah in Israel.
Democratization in the former USSR has brought with it a good deal of tragic irony for the country's minorities, especially the Jewish population. The absence of Soviet-era repression exposed the remaining Jews to a resurgence of anti-Semitism in the former Soviet Union, led by ultra-nationalist demagogue Vladimir Zhirinovsky. However, there has not been a return to mass anti-Semitic incidents in Russia or anywhere else throughout the former Soviet Union.
See also Pamyat.
Jews in Russia today
Jewish life
The main central Jewish organization in Russia is the Federation of Jewish Communities of the CIS under the leadership of Chief Rabbi Berel Lazar.
Anti-semitism
Anti-Semitic pronouncements, speeches and articles are common in Russia, and there are a large number of anti-Semitic neo-Nazi groups in the republics of the former Soviet Union, leading Pravda to declare in 2002 that "Anti-semitism is booming in Russia"[11]. Over the past few years there have also been bombs attached to anti-semitic signs, apparently aimed at Jews, and other violent incidents, including stabbings, have been recorded.
Though the government of Vladimir Putin takes a strong official stand against anti-semitism, other political parties and groups are explicitly anti-semitic. In 2005, a group of 15 Duma members demanded that Judaism and Jewish organizations be banned from Russia. In June, 500 prominent Russians, including some 20 members of the nationalist Rodina party, demanded that the state prosecutor investigate ancient Jewish texts as "anti-Russian" and ban Judaism -- the investigation was actually launched, but halted among international outcry.
Assimilation trends
In the Tsarist Russia, assimilation, russification and conversion to the state religion of Orthodox Christianity were official policies. After coming to power and dealing severe blows to all religions, the Bolsheviks undertook efforts to form a new nation of the Soviet people (Советский народ).
The Russian Empire and later the Soviet Union, one of the world's most ethnically diverse nations, with hundreds of distinct nationalities, was also home to a Jewish population of about two million before its disintegration in 1991, making Jews the eleventh largest Soviet nationality (the USSR classified Jews as a nationality). Despite such diversity, Jews were a unique minority in the ideological state. Before and after the Bolshevik Revolution many of the Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Baltic Jews embraced secular education and culture, thereby becoming a minority that had adapted the Russian language and culture.
Jews, in that sense, were not "foreigners" within Soviet Russia, like Tatars or indigenous Siberians, but instead a distinct, cohesive group bounded by a common value system, Yiddish language, exclusive cultural institutions, synagogues, and Zionist nationalism, despite the absence of a territorial unit or a single locale. This existence is thus alien to Marxism-Leninism as espoused by the Soviet state, which viewed Jewish cohesiveness as resulting from class struggle, binding proletariat Jews to Jews in oppressor classes. Marxist egalitarianism and universality suggested that it would be ideal to see the assimilation of Jews and the renunciation of Judaism, in a sense contradicting the elements that allowed Jews to be distinct members of society. All Soviet ethnic groups, such as Russians, Ukrainians, Uzbeks, Tatars, were encouraged to look at class over nationality, but did not face assimilation and cultural annihilation because of their individual locales and common languages. While Jews had been bound together in the past by Yiddish, most by the end of the Stalinist era had already adapted the Russian language and culture, and tended to live alongside Slavic gentiles.
Certain Marxists predicted such a sociological trend, but miscalculated the extent to which this trend would erode the coheisiveness of the Jewish community. Karl Marx and some later Marxists assumed that the Jewish identity would cease to exist after the demise of capitalism since man can only be free when he transcended the confines of individuality and locality and recognized a shared humanity, "a universal existence", free of antagonism and divisiveness, which only exist due to class struggle. Although the Jewish community went from being one of the most isolated in Europe to one of the most assimilated in Europe from the time of the Bolshevik Revolution to the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union, the identity has not faded away by any means.
Law throughout Soviet history, however, listed Jews as one of the Union's "basic nations", with their own language (Yiddish), and their own autonomous region — a failed, inhospitable settlement in the Russian Far East that was nonetheless symbolic. The word "Еврей" (Yevrei, "Jew") was also listed in the "национальность" ("nationality") section (the infamous "Пятая графа" (pyataya grafa, "the fifth record") of the obligatory internal passport document, which stated the ethnic or national background of all Soviet citizens. Such treatment of Jews as a nationality is somewhat alien to Jewish law, but reminiscent of Zionism. In May 1976, the Soviet journal Party Life prominently displayed Jews as a distinct "nationality."
While Soviet socialism clearly did not destroy the Jewish identity, it nevertheless weakened a degree of cultural cohesiveness. Hebrew and Yiddish laguages, Jewish theaters, Jewish schools, religion and Zionism bounded the Soviet Jewish population together despite the absence of a common locale; but these were the very elements restricted by a Soviet Union promoting secularism among all its citizens. The closings of synagogues and other important Jewish cultural institutions, such as theaters, schools and periodicals, were conducted under this ideological context of egalitarianism. While threatening to Judaism and the Jewish culture, the regime enforced the same policies on other religions, leading to the development of a modern, secular state. However, after the end of the Second World War, the restrictions against Christians and Muslims were gradually reduced, while the persecution of Judaism remained in force. The rise of Jewish secularism thus paralleled social trends among Soviet gentiles, but had threatening overtones to Jewish existence. Soviet secularism, the discouragement of Yiddish, and the restriction of other elements that forged an exclusive, Jewish identity, caused assimilation to be a foreboding threat to Jewish existence. Soviet rule can be characterized by a rise in intermarriages and abandonment of Jewish identities by those who were eager to prove their loyalty to the Communist Party's atheism and proletarian internationalism, and committed to stamp out any sign of "Jewish cultural particularism", such as Leon Trotsky, Maxim Litvinov or Lazar Kaganovich.
Assimilated Jews significantly contributed to Russian and Soviet multi-ethnic culture, science and technology. It is hard to imagine Russian art without Isaac Levitan and Léon Bakst; Russian literature — Isaac Babel, Osip Mandelstam and Boris Pasternak; Russian ballet — Ida Rubinstein and Maya Plisetskaya; Soviet cinematoraphy — Sergei Eisenstein; Russian and Soviet music — Anton Rubinstein and Isaak Dunayevsky; comedy — Faina Ranevskaya, Arkady Raikin; science — Lev Landau and Abram Ioffe; weapon industry — Boris Vannikov, Mikhail Gurevich and Semyon Lavochkin.
Demographic data
The official census data on Jewish population of Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union.[12] The number of Jews has fallen from about 2.15 million in 1970 (the third largest population in the world, after the USA and Israel, and the fourth largest ethnic group in the Soviet Union) to 1.45 million in 1989 (less than 600,000 in Russia itself) and to some 250,000 in Russia, according to the 2002 census. The decline is mostly due to emigration to Israel, but close to one million Jews living on the territory of the Soviet Union, but not on the territory of contemporary Russia, do not appear in the most recent censuses.
| Year | Jewish population, millions | Note |
|---|---|---|
| 1914 | More than 5.25 | Russian Empire |
| 1939 | 3 | A result of emigration, assimilation and repressions |
| Early 1941 | 5.4 | A result of the annexation of Western Ukraine and Belarus, Baltic republics, and inflow of Jewish refugees from Poland |
| 1959 | 2.26 | See the Shoah |
| 1970 | 2.15 | |
| 1979 | 1.81 | |
| 1989 | 1.45 | |
| End of 1993 | Less than 0.4 | A result of mass emigration and assimilation. Militaryov calls this number "especially funny". By his estimate, the real number should be 2-3 millions. See also Jewish Virtual Library |
The Jewish population in the Jewish Autonomous Oblast of the Russian Far East as of 2002 is 2,327 (1.22%).
The Central Asian Jews, self-designating as jahudi, isroel or bane isroel, also known as Bukhara, live mainly in Uzbek cities. The number of Central Asian Jews was around 20,800 in 1959. They speak a special dialect of the Tajik language. [13]
The Georgian Jews numbered about 35,700 in 1964, most of them living in Georgia. [14]
The Caucasian Mountain Jews, also known as Tats or Dagchufuts, live mostly in Dagestan, with a scattered population in Azerbaijan. In 1959, they numbered around 15,000 in Dagestan and 10,000 in Azerbaijan. Their Tat language is a dialect of Farsi. [15]
The Crimean Jews, self-designating as Krymchaks, traditionally lived in the Crimea, numbering around 5,700 in 1897. Due to a famine, a number emigrated to Turkey and the USA in the 1920. The remaining population was virtually annihilated in the Holocaust during the Nazi occupation of the Crimea, but Krymchaks re-settled the Crimea after the war, and in 1959, between 1,000 and 1,800 had returned. [16]
See also
- Jewish history and Jewish diaspora
- Regional history
- Other
Footnotes
- ^ History of the national question in Russia at Russian Committee in defense of the human rights (in Russian), also in AXT: Russia and in Studies in Comparative Genocide by Levon Chorbajian (p.237)
- ^ A History of Russia by Nicholas Riasanovsky, p.395
- ^ But Were They Good for the Jews? by Elliot Rosenberg, p.183
- ^ The newest history of the Jewish people, 1789-1914 by Simon Dubnow, vol.3, Russian ed., p.152
- ^ Iosif Stalin. Works, Vol. 13, July 1930-January 1934, Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1955, p. 30
- ^ According to historian Gennady Kostyrchenko, recently opened Soviet archives contain evidence that the assassination was organized by L.M. Tsanava and S. Ogoltsov of the MVD
- ^ Draft report by the Commission for Crimes Committed by the Nazis in Kiev from February 1944. The page 14 shows changes made by G.F. Aleksandrov, head of the Propaganda and Agitation Department of the Party's Central Committee
- ^ A History of the Jews by Paul Johnson, London, 1987, p.527
- ^ UN Debate Regarding the Special Committee on Palestine: Gromyko Statement. 14 May 1947 77th Plenary Meeting Document A/2/PV.77
- ^ History of Dissident Movement in the USSR by Ludmila Alekseyeva. Vilnius, 1992 (in Russian)
- ^ Explosion of anti-Semitism in Russia Pravda, 2002-07-30, retrieved 17 Oct 2005.
- ^ Implemented Myth (Russian ed.: Воплощённый миф) 2003, p. 46) by Dr. Alexander Militaryov, director of Moscow Jewish University ISBN 580620068X
References
- Anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union, its Roots and Consequences, proceedings of a seminar held in Jerusalem, April 7-8, 1978, The Hebrew University, Center for Research and Documentation of East European Jewry, 1979.
- Antisemitism: The Longest Hatred, Robert S. Wistrich. Pantheon Books, 1992
- Anti-Semitism, article in The Encyclopedia Judaica, Keter Publishing
- The Jewish Century by Yuri Slezkine. Princeton: Princeton University Press 2004. ISBN 0-691-11995-3
- Enemy At His Pleasure: A Journey Through The Jewish Pale Of Settlement During World War I by S. Ansky, 2004. ISBN 0-8050-5945-8
- Protest against the suppression of Hebrew in the Soviet Union 1930-1931 signed by Albert Einstein, among others