Figure 3.1 V. Elkin, “Long Live the Fraternal Union and Great Friendship of the Nations of the USSR!” Soviet ethnicities in national costumes, each banner greets Stalin in the national language. 1938.
Source: Hoover Institution Archives.
Where many locals had in fact collaborated with the Germans (sometimes from anti-Soviet sentiment, sometimes simply to survive), hundreds of thousands were arrested and deported. In all of these cases, a high percentage of those deported died on the way east due to the brutal conditions of deportation. While these arrests were not based exclusively on nationality, the simple fact of mass arrests of Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, and Ukrainians did much to terrorize the entire population and discourage any overt signs of anti-Soviet patriotic sentiment.
It is difficult to overstate the brutality of the years 1939-45 in the USSR and in particular in its western regions. To begin with, the Jewish population of this area, numbering in the hundreds of thousands, was either deported or - in the vast majority of cases - murdered by the Nazi death machinery. The much smaller but also significant German community had either been “called home” by the Nazis in late 1939 (some then returned after the Nazi invasion in 1941) or had fled before the Red Army. The western frontier of the USSR was significantly altered, extending the Soviet border around one to 200 miles to the west. The nationality mix among this region’s population changed even more radically. To the north, when the border with Finland was pushed around 100 miles to the west, one million Finns fled rather than live under Soviet rule. In the Baltic countries mass emigration to the west combined with mass arrests deprived these nations of badly needed educated leadership. In western Belarus and Ukraine, newly incorporated from interwar Poland, the Polish land-holding class and intelligentsia resident there for centuries were arrested, deported, and in thousands of cases murdered by their Ukrainian neighbors. In 1944 agreements were signed by the Belarusian, Ukrainian, and Lithuanian SSRs and Poland for voluntary population exchanges. Millions of Poles left their homes in what was now the USSR; hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians had to resettle from Poland to the Ukrainian SSR. While these population transfers were ostensibly “voluntary,” they were carried out in an atmosphere of fear and violence that makes it difficult to speak of truly free choice.29
The extension of Soviet rule westward was not received passively. The Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) fought first the Germans, then the Red Army, and also attacked local Poles, wishing their departure from a pure ethnic Ukraine.30 Despite desperate odds, Ukrainian resistence against Soviet rule continued until the early 1950s. Similarly in the Baltic republics, anti-Soviet national partisans known as the “Forest Brethren” carried out attacks on Red Army personnel and Communist Party members. This was a nearly suicidal struggle but when faced with the stark choice between arrest by the Soviet authorities and armed resistance to them, many Baltic and Ukrainian patriots took the latter course. Partisan leaders such as Stefan Bandera of Ukraine have now, in the early twenty-first century, become nationalist heroes in independent post-Soviet countries.
At the end of World War II the fusion of Russian and Soviet patriotism seemed complete. For many the continuity between the Russian Empire and the USSR seemed only too apparent. An antisemitism similar to that of pre-1917 government officials, while never openly espoused, can be detected in the almost blanket refusal to acknowledge either Jewish contributions to the war effort or the specific tragedy of the Jewish people under Nazi rule. Already in 1944 and 1945 Soviet press accounts of sites of mass murder of Jews, such as Baby Yar outside Kiev or Ponary (Paneriai) outside Vilnius, mention Jews - if at all - only as one persecuted nationality among many. Nonetheless we should not lose sight of the very significant differences between Soviet nationality policy and that of the Russian Empire. To start with, unlike tsarist officials, the communist rulers explicitly acknowledged the rights of non-Russians to develop their culture. Even while carrying out measures of breathtaking brutality (e. g., against Lithuanian nationalist partisans in the mid - to latter 1940s), Moscow was expending resources to set up journals, schools, universities, and other institutions to nurture these languages and cultures - but of course as part of the greater Soviet family of nations. The contradictions of Soviet nationality policy, both repressing and encouraging national cultures, would never be resolved, and in the 1940s reached perhaps their most brutal extremes.
Russia’s “Jewish Question”: 1861-1945
Jews have played a unique and striking role in European and world history, quite out of proportion to their numbers. The same can be said for Russian history, where in 1897 Jews made up just over 5 percent of the total population according to official figures. At this point more Jews lived in the Russian Empire than in any other country of the world, and their “visibility” for the Russian government and for Russian society was far higher than their percentage in the total population. After all, Muslims taken as a whole made up a larger percentage of the tsar’s subjects, but one only seldom encounters discussions of the “Muslim question” in Russian journals or newspapers before 1905. Nor were Muslims ever considered a nationality, as Jews were both unofficially before 1917 and officially under Soviet rule. Jews were unique in the fact that their religion and “nationality” (defined as language, culture, everyday life) more or less coincided in the Russian Empire and much of eastern Europe up to the early twentieth century. And the unique strength of antisemitism, which was transformed from a religious prejudice to a political-racial ideology in the decades before World War I, also contributed to the identity of Jews as a nation, not just a religious group.
The “Jewish question” was something of an obsession both among liberals and conservatives. For Russian liberals, Jews were potential allies in the struggle for a democratic, secular, progressive Russia. For conservatives, Jews represented the evils of modernity (capitalism, secularism, loose morals, socialism) lumped together. In both cases, the liberal and conservative viewpoint, of course, we are dealing more with myths than with objective realities, but one should never underestimate the importance of myths in history. The “Jewish myth” - whether positive or negative - played every bit as important a role in Russian/Soviet politics and culture as did actual political, economic, and sociological realities.31
This is not to say that realities have no importance. One of the reasons why the image of “the Jew” was so ubiquitous was the fact that Jews lived in significant numbers in European Russia - over five million in 1897. Jews were the only large non-Christian population in the west of the empire, and lived among Slavic (Ukrainian, Belarusian, Polish) peasants. Before the late eighteenth century (the Partitions of Poland) no Jews had been allowed, at least officially, to reside within the Russian Empire. Even Peter the Great, who welcomed so many other foreigners to Russia, would allow the immigration of Jews. This situation changed abruptly with the Partitions of Poland, when suddenly the largest Jewish community on earth found itself living within the western borderlands of the Russian Empire.32 By the mid-nineteenth century Jews lived in significant numbers only in specific provinces that a century earlier had belonged to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the so - called Pale of Settlement stretching from present - day Lithuania to Ukraine. The Kingdom of Poland, created at the Congress of Vienna with the tsar as king, did not legally belong to the Pale, but also included a large Jewish community. Except for very wealthy merchants, Jews could not live outside these specific provinces and were subject to a number of other restrictions on livelihood and mobility in different periods.
Living among Slavic and Lithuanian (but not, with rare exception, among ethnic Russian) peasants, Jews spoke their own languages (Yiddish, and for sacred purposes, Hebrew), married within their own community, and led an everyday life (food, clothing, holidays) quite distinct from their Slavic neighbors. Jews rarely tilled the soil, earning their meager keep instead as traders, shopkeepers, and artisans. The figure of the Jewish peddler, innkeeper, or petty trader in Lithuanian, Russian, Polish, and Yiddish literature was based on this sociological reality: shops run by Christians, in most towns of the region, were unusual enough to deserve special mention. In great part this commercial tradition on the part of Jews was part of the heritage of medieval and early modern Poland, where Jews had served as the agents of landowners. Such was, in a nutshell, the general situation of Jews in Russia around 1861.33
The small community of educated, Russian-speaking Jews in the 1860s had high hopes for emancipation during the Great Reforms. Following the example of the “enlightened” followers of Moses Mendelssohn in Berlin - the maskilim - they envisaged a progressive community of Russian-speaking Jews who would be both Russian patriots and devout Jews. But Alexander II could not be persuaded to eliminate all restrictions on the Jews (in particular their forced residence within the Pale) and instead only issued specific “privileges” for certain individuals, such as artisans, students, and other groups deemed of economic importance for the Russian Empire. The relationship of the Russian government toward the Jews was always conflicting, on the one hand distrusting “backward, Asiatic” traditional Jews, while on the other highly uncomfortable with modern, Russianspeaking Jews. To be sure, one could convert to Russian Orthodoxy, at which point one ceased - legally - to be a Jew. Even here, however, the Russian government was too conservative to encourage mass conversions, seeing (correctly) that in many cases conversions were motivated less by religious conviction than by the desire to free oneself of legal restrictions. At the same time state schools for Jews were set up using Russian (and in Warsaw before 1863, Polish) as the language of instruction. Jewish parents usually avoided these institutions, fearing that their real purpose was to convert their children to Christianity.34
Among the terrorists who assassinated Alexander II on March 1, 1881, there was one irreligious woman of Jewish descent, Gesia Gelfman. But even the presence of this lone Jewish radical among the terrorists was used by Russian conservatives to whip up a press frenzy in the months afterwards against the Jews as disloyal revolutionaries. In part due to this press campaign a wave of attacks against Jewish homes and businesses broke out in the southwestern provinces (now Ukraine) in summer 1881.35
At the time it was widely believed that the Russian government planned these pogroms (the Russian word soon passed into English), but extensive research in the past few decades has shown this to be very unlikely. To be sure, Russian officials - and the new tsar Alexander III - did not harbor positive feelings about Jews, but they feared above all public disorder and would not have been likely to encourage attacks on property, even Jewish property. In any case no archival documents supporting the thesis of government planning of pogroms have been found, though the failure of local police to respond quickly to attacks on Jews may well have been motivated by anti-Jewish sentiments. Be this as it may the pogroms of 1881 came as an enormous shock and seemed to call into question the very possibility of assimilation into the Russian nation. The pogroms were followed, moreover, by further legal restrictions on Jews, the so-called May Laws, which prevented Jews from settling in rural areas of the Pale and obliged them to refrain from doing business on Christian holidays. Increasingly Jews had a difficult time earning even the most modest living and the word luftmentsh - someone who lives on air - was frequently used to describe the economic misery of the Jewish community in Russia. The great waves of Jewish immigration from Russia to North America and England began in the decade after the 1881 pogroms.36
In the final generation before the 1917 revolutions the number of Russianspeaking Jews increased significantly, as the growth of the Jewish community in St Petersburg shows.37 But speaking a language does not necessarily mean feeling a part of a nation. By the early twentieth century a number of Jewish parties (before 1905, like all political parties in Russia, illegal) existed that exhibited all possible mixtures of socialism, liberalism, and nationalism. The two most important lines were the socialist Bund that combined socialist political ideals with a secular Jewish national identity based on the Yiddish language, and various strains of Zionism that envisaged an independent, Hebrew-speaking Jewish state. Many Jews also participated in Russian and Polish political parties, from the liberal Kadets and the Polish patriotic-socialist PPS, to the radical Mensheviks and Bolsheviks.38
In Russia, as throughout Europe, antisemitism grew in the decades before 1914. The reasons for this phenomenon are many: the general growth of nationalist sentiment in these years, the feeling that the Jews were “getting ahead” (i. e., successfully adapting to the conditions of modern society) too fast, and the mythic image of the Jew as the embodiment of modernity, incorporating fear of capitalism, secular society, and parliamentary democracy. In the Russian Empire antisemites could point to several well-known individuals of Jewish origin (the fact that many had converted was of no importance for antisemites) such as the sugar magnate Lev Brodskii, the railroad entrepreneur Ivan/Jan Bloch, and the banking family Kronenberg, as proof that the “Jews were taking over.” The fact that young Jews were visible in illegal revolutionary activity was blown up into a general threat to stability, Christianity, and fatherland.
In fact most Jews in Russia remained poor, traditional, and religious. At the same time increasing numbers of Jews were succeeding, by dint of intelligence and hard work, in bettering their lives through education. Despite tsarist restrictions on Jews at institutions of secondary and higher learning, the figure of the Jewish doctor or lawyer, speaking fluent - if perhaps accented - Russian or Polish, become more and more common, to the rage of antisemites. These middle-class Jews often held liberal political views, were great Polish or Russian patriots, and fervently believed that it was possible to combine Jewish and Russian (or Polish) identities. Their children, however, brought up speaking only a Gentile tongue and in most ways culturally identical to their Christian neighbors, often felt keenly their alienation from both traditional, Yiddish-speaking, religious Jewry on the one hand, and from the Russian and Polish nations on the other. Some of this younger generation, like Lev Davidovich Bronshtein (“Trotsky”), would see the solution in socialist revolution; others, like the leader of Zionist revisionism, Vladimir Zhabotinskii (born 1880), would opt for Jewish nationalism.39
The crisis in Jewish relations with their Christian neighbors can be seen in the increasingly violent pogroms of the early twentieth century, starting with the
Kishinev (now Chifinau, Moldova) pogrom in 1903. In 1881 property damage had been high, but there were almost no mortal victims (perhaps one or two). In Kishinev, Jewish homes and businesses were destroyed and dozens of Jews were murdered during attacks. Outrage at the Kishinev massacre was expressed in public meetings across Europe, at Madison Square Garden in New York, and by condemnations of anti-Jewish policies in Russia made by the US Congress and President Theodore Roosevelt. During the 1905-6 revolutions, attacks on Jews were even bloodier, with thousands losing their lives. Violence escalated during the Civil War (1918-20), with tens of thousands of Jews killed, mainly by soldiers of the White armies.''0 Several factors came together to cause this massive outpouring of violence. Jews found themselves branded socialist and antipatriotic (ironically often by both sides of a dispute, such as by Poles and Ukrainians alike). The Whites openly equated Jews with revolution and often allowed their soldiers to run riot in the Jewish sections of town, robbing and committing violence at will. The participation of White, Polish, and Ukrainian troops in anti-Jewish atrocities made many Jews look more favorably on Soviet power for its vociferous condemnation of antisemitism and support for Jewish equal rights.
It was not the communists, however, who had granted Russia’s Jews legal equality: that was done under the Provisional Government in 1917. Even before 1917 Lenin had shown himself to be consistently contemptuous of antisemites, but equally impatient with the idea of Jewish nationality and with the Jewish Bund’s pretensions to represent the Jewish working class. After the October 1917 revolution Jews were guaranteed the right to use their native tongue (Yiddish) in schools and publishing. The communists treated the Jewish religion like any other, guaranteeing its freedom in principle but in practice restricting its practice and regarding it as a survival of a less enlightened epoch and a force fundamentally hostile to Soviet power. A special section of the Communist Party (“Evsektsiia”) was set up both to fight other Jewish parties (especially the Zionists and the Bund) and to help integrate Jews into party life.41 In the 1920s Yiddish-language publishing flourished in the USSR (especially in the Belarusian capital Minsk) and proposals for an autonomous Jewish territorial unit somewhere in the USSR were hotly debated. In 1934 the Jewish Autonomous Region of Birobidzhan was established thousands of miles east of any large Jewish settlements on the border of China and far closer to Tokyo than to Jerusalem. Birobidzhan was supposed to provide the three million Jews of the USSR with a Yiddish-speaking “homeland” (to rival the one being established by Zionists in Palestine / Erets Israel) but the remote, harsh region failed to attract large numbers of Jewish settlers: in 1939 fewer than 18,000 Jews lived there, around 16 percent of the autonomous region’s total population.42
The Jewish future in the USSR lay not in Birobidzhan, but in burgeoning cities like Kiev, Moscow, and Leningrad. In the 1920s, and even more in the next decade, hundreds of thousands of Jews left the countryside or the Jewish small town (shtetl) for the big, Russian-speaking city. They generally left the Yiddish language and traditional modes of Jewish life behind. Abandoning the religious and linguistic culture of their forefathers, Soviet Jews were the ideal recipients for secularized, Russian-speaking Soviet culture. The USSR seemed to hold out the promise of creating a new, progressive nation based not on the past (ancestors, native tongue, heritage) but the future. For many Jews, especially of the younger generation, the prospect of participating in the creation of this new society was intoxicating. And viewed statistically, Jews achieved great accomplishments in the first decades of the USSR. Jewish membership in the Communist Party considerably exceeded their percentage in the general population, Jews figured prominently among college graduates, and by the end of the 1930s dominated in a number of professions. Yuri Slezkine notes that in 1939 Jews made up more than half of all dentists and pharmacists, over a third of doctors and defense lawyers, and a quarter of musicians in Leningrad.43 Before 1917, it should be remembered, only Jews of certain privileged categories had been permitted to live in the city.
While Jews gained much in the first generation of Soviet rule, they also gave up much. By the end of the 1930s it had become exceptional for Jews to raise their children in Yiddish or to keep kosher. To be sure, similar if more muted processes can be observed among American Jews. In the USSR, however, Jewish identity was increasingly rejected in favor of a broader Soviet-Russian self-image. But, as the old rabbi’s words have it, “If you forget you’re a Jew, don’t worry: a Gentile will remind you.” While many Soviet Jews had begun to shed their Jewish identity and intermarry with Russians, anti-Jewish prejudices remained strong in Soviet society and even among communists, Stalin included. The rapid advance of Jews in Soviet society was resented by those less successful, and Stalin had never forgotten the Jewish origins of Trotsky and many of his supporters. At the same time anti-Soviet propaganda in the west often portrayed communist rule as a conspiracy of Jews to exercise power over Christians, as in the Polish myth of Zydokomuna. After World War II a new kind of specifically Soviet antisemitism would be created, drawing on all of these resentments and prejudices.
In the late 1930s and early 1940s, of course, the immediate threat to Jews emanated from racial antisemitism as embodied in the Nazi party in Germany. While the USSR continued to condemn all forms of racism, including antisemitism, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between the USSR and Nazi Germany could hardly reassure Soviet Jews. But the legal status of Jews in the Soviet Union remained unchanged. The terrible events of the period 1939-45 - mass arrests, war, the Holocaust - destroyed what remained of traditional Jewish culture in the USSR. Ironically those thousands of Jews arrested by the Soviet authorities in 1939 and 1940 often survived because they had been deported to Siberia or central Asia. With the almost total extinction of native Yiddish-speakers in Lithuania, Poland,
And Ukraine, that linguistic culture lost not only its main readership, but also the potential for future invigoration. After the Holocaust, Soviet Jews remained by far the largest Jewish community in Europe, but their knowledge of basic elements of Jewish tradition, culture, and religion remained low and their tendency to intermarry with non-Jews called into question their future as a separate community.
The “nationality question” was a constant challenge and irritation for Russian and Soviet leaders. The Russian Empire preferred to ignore the issue whenever possible, acting as if non-Russian nationalities were peripheral and insignificant, placing restrictions on the rights of some non-Russian nationalities (especially Poles, Jews, and Muslims), and reacting with brutal repressions when national separatism seemed a threat. The USSR took a different tack, setting up a special Peoples Commissariat to deal with the issue, forcing Soviet citizens to choose a single national identity, and institutionalizing nationality in territorial units such as union republics and autonomous districts, as well as in every Soviet citizens passport.
Yet from the mid-1930s at latest the USSR also fell back on traditional forms of Russian dominance, not overtly denying other nationalities their rights but insisting on the preeminence and predominance of Russian culture within the USSR. Pushkin and other classics of Russian literature were translated into, for example, Tajik and Georgian, but rarely did the Soviet cultural authorities consider it necessary to introduce Russians to the poets and artists of non-Russian Soviet nations. It is a bitter irony of history that the one national group to become most “successfully” Russified and Sovietized (the two terms are not always easy to distinguish), the Jews, became increasingly discriminated against and alienated from Soviet Orthodoxy in the generations after 1945. In the twenty-first century, both in the Russian Federation and the other 14 countries formed after the dissolution of the USSR, nationality remains a prickly and contentious issue.
World History
