The Background
Discrimination in Government and Education The Background THERE ARE, of course, no independent agencies inside Russia to probe and challenge official denials of discrimination against Jews in...
...Ilychev used the same occasion to set the National Guardian straight on Khrushchev's views...
...Furtseva's words, his own explanation more than corroborated the essence of her statement...
...Feffer and Bergelson raised this question at a closed meeting...
...Subsequently, Bergelson went on to say, it became crystal-clear that the anti-Semitic policy in the internal affairs of the Soviet Union had been fully sanctioned by Stalin and the Politburo...
...But sufficient evidence has accumulated over the years, from students of the subject, from knowledgeable visitors and from defectors, to prove that such a policy exists and is thoroughly implemented...
...Significant light on the background of the discriminatory policy against Jews in government was provided by Bernard Turner, a journalist who survived a 10-year sentence at a forced labor camp in Bratsk, Siberia...
...Never at any time during the Soviet power were there any quotas for Jews or persons of some other nationality, and there are not now...
...This was part of the text of the interview published in Realites in May 1957: "KHRUSHCHEV: Anti-Semitic sentiments still exist here...
...It is quite understandable that any people should want to create their own cadres and prefer their leading ones to be of their own nationality...
...Lazar Kaganovich [the only Jew on the Politburo] refused even to talk about the matter...
...Jewish Communist circles learned of a top-secret decree issued by the Central Committee of the Party that Jews, Communist or not, were to be excluded from the Polish and Czechoslovakian 'national armies' which had been formed by Colonel Berling and General Svoboda on Soviet soil...
...Worse still was the argument that a state which has many nationalities must always consider the sensitivities of these nationalities and peoples...
...PERVUKHIN: . . . our own intelligentsia...
...What Khrushchev said, he explained, was that after the Revolution some of the USSR's national republics did not have their own national trained core of key people, that these cadres at the time were largely Russian...
...At the camp, he encountered David Bergelson and Itzik Feffer, two distinguished Soviet Jewish writers victimized by the 1948 purge...
...In an interview published in the pro-Soviet New York weekly, National Guardian, on June 25, 1956, Madame Ekaterina Furtseva, a member of the Party Presidium, replied to a question concerning the implications of the Khrushchev statement to the French Socialists: "She said that some years back, talk of anti-Semitism here [in Russia] was stirred as a result of misinterpretations of certain Government actions...
...He later conferred with Foreign Minister Andrei Vishinsky, who denied the very existence of any discrimination against Jews...
...Dekanozov had been Soviet Ambassador in Berlin during the Nazi-Soviet Pact.] The institute had a rigid quota for Jewish students...
...Furtseva this explanation: In her interview she meant that if at some time there had taken place changes in office personnel, these changes were dictated by the economic needs of the country and under no circumstances were aimed at any discrimination of persons of any nationality...
...The explanation is full of enormous contradictions...
...He tried terribly hard to prove to me with examples that the transfer or dismissal of Jewish employes in once-backward republics that now have 'their own' intelligentsia and professional people capable of occupying the posts previously held by Jews or Russians has nothing to do with anti-Semitism...
...The latter would not accept these pretensions at all well, especially since they do not consider themselves less intelligent or less capable than the Jews...
...But for the sake of good relations among peoples, the authorities intervened and only two Jews were sent, the other four being chosen from among other nationalities...
...They were more educated, maybe more revolutionary than the average Russian...
...Are there two classes of citizens in the Soviet Union...
...It happened that all the six chosen were Jews...
...Why yield to the demands of undemocratic elements...
...A foreign service training institute was opened in Moscow, headed by Deputy Foreign Minister Vladimir G. Dekanozov (who later shared the fate of his comrade, Beria...
...But what is the meaning of 'their own' in a Socialist country...
...If a chief of an office or department found that in his office there existed over-saturation of a certain group of specialists, then proceeding from the economic needs of the country and with no reference to nationality, some of the specialists were given other posts in industry, agriculture and other branches...
...At the outset of the Revolution, we had many Jews in the leadership of the Party and of the State...
...Steps were taken to transfer them to other enterprises, giving them equally good positions and without jeopardizing their rights...
...This was reported by National Guardian the following September: "Mr...
...Ilychev secured from Mme...
...Bergelson and Feffer had also been leading Jewish communal figures and prominent members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee...
...Statements made by top Soviet leaders, including Khrushchev himself, leave no doubt that the Jews are considered alien in Soviet society and that a policy of discrimination in "sensitive" positions is conducted against them...
...The manifestly exclusionary implications of the repeated references, by Khrushchev, Pervukhin, Furtseva and Ilychev, to "their own" and "indigenous" cadres was deeply resented by the Canadian Communist, J. B. Salsberg, as he reported it in his articles...
...He states that he inquired about the Furtseva interview at one of the official sessions he had with top Soviet leaders, among them Khrushchev and Suslov: "To my great regret and shame, I must record the fact that, though one of the main leaders who answered neither confirmed nor denied Mme...
...In 1944, the Soviet Foreign Ministry suffered from a dearth of diplomats...
...One such inadvertent admission was made by Khrushchev, accompanied by Mikhail Pervukhin, a member of the Party Presidium, in the interview with the French Socialist delegation in May 1956...
...The decree expressly stated that every Jew of typical Jewish appearance (a 'Jewish nose,' curly hair, Yiddish accent) was to be excluded from the Polish Army of Liberation, the Red Army and the NKVD units attached to the Polish Army...
...The furor created by the Furtseva statement, clearly if indirectly admitting that Government policies of discrimination in employment were directed at Jews as such, led to a clarification by the then press chief of the Soviet Foreign Ministry, Leonid Ilychev...
...KHRUSHCHEV: Should the Jews want to occupy the foremost positions in our republic now, it would naturally be taken amiss by the indigenous inhabitants...
...It was then that they learned for the first time of the anti-Semitic policy pursued by Party and State in the Soviet Union...
...The following excerpt is from an article by Turner in Number 25 (1956) of Di Goldene Kayt, a well-known Yiddish magazine published in Tel Aviv: "Feffer and Bergelson told me that their arrest was a culmination of developments that went back to 1944...
...Discrimination in Government and Education The Background THERE ARE, of course, no independent agencies inside Russia to probe and challenge official denials of discrimination against Jews in higher education and Government employment...
...Or, for instance, when a Jew in the Ukraine is appointed to an important post and he surrounds himself with Jewish collaborators, it is understandable that this should create jealousy and hostility toward the Jews...
...The Government had found in some of its departments a heavy concentration of Jewish people, upwards of 50 per cent of the staff...
...Who examined, and why, the student chosen from Minsk, Moscow and Kiev, to determine whether he was a 100 per cent White Russian, Great Russian or Ukrainian, or only a Jewish White Russian, a Jewish Great Russian or a Jewish Ukrainian...
...Jews of 'good' appearance could remain in the Polish Army, but would have to change their names to pure Polish and eradicate any trace of their Jewish identity...
...In due course, we have created new cadres...
...He described the problem that came up when six gifted music students were sent by the Government to an international music competition...
...This is a complicated problem because of the position of the Jews and their relations with the other peoples...
...How does it jibe with the 'integration' theory and with the assertion that the Jews 'are expressing themselves in the culture of the people among whom they live...
...Deputy Foreign Minister] A. L. Lozovsky vainly brought the matter to the attention of Dekanozov...
...But this does not mean that able Jewish people are not and will not be promoted...
...But now the Revolution was almost 40 years old, new cadres had been created and the people of these republics were demanding a place for them...
Vol. 42 • September 1959 • No. 33
