THE SOVIET PATTERN IN PERSPECTIVE
A REPORT BY THE EDITORS JEWS IN THE SOVIET UNION The Soviet Pattern in Perspective THROUGHOUT MODERN history, the treatment of national, racial and religious minorities has been a barometer of...
...The situation is all the more damaging to the self-assumed Soviet role of champion of democracy of the disadvantaged minorities everywhere in the non-Communist world and of the newly-independent Asian and African nations who still retain memories of discrimination at the hands of their former colonial masters...
...But even this came to a sudden and violent end 11 years ago...
...the Korean War...
...On this passport, which serves as an identity card, there is a space"Paragraph 5" for the specification of the citizen's nationality...
...The consequences of this policy were felt primarily in the political and linguistic spheres...
...Autonomous communal and cultural organizations were increasingly disbanded...
...Religious practice and instruction were drastically curtailed and virtually driven underground...
...the drive toward rigid conformity in Soviet arts and sciences...
...This policy has a history, and it is related to the development of the Soviet nationalities policy as a whole...
...Journalists, political figures and other informed parties in the non-Communist world have repeatedly questioned Soviet leaders about the status of Soviet Jewry...
...Yet despite this formal recognition, the Soviet Government deprives its Jewish citizens of the bulk of even the minimal cultural and spiritual privileges enjoyed by all other Soviet nationalities and religious groups...
...It provides the Jews with neither the means for maintaining a full cultural life nor the opportunity to assimilate completely...
...The more than 200 distinct nationalities and ethnic groups in the USSR have for centuries inhabited the geographical regions in which they reside and have retained their national consciousness, languages, literatures, folklore and customs...
...And yet, as the documents in this report demonstrate, the contradiction exists, and it is manifestly a source of deep embarrassment to the Kremlin...
...Nevertheless, the forms and formalities did exist...
...The Soviet Government cannot, of course, admit its discriminatory policy toward the Jews...
...the fight against "revisionists" in the world Communist movement and the expulsion of Marshal Tito from the Cominform...
...It is above all embarrassing to the Soviet Government at the very time it is engaged in a major campaign for the good will of the Western world...
...Every Soviet Jew is required to specify as his nationality: "Yevrei""Jew...
...No doubt such an extension of the policy had both an economic reason (literacy is indispensable to modern industrialization) and a political reason (literacy facilitates the penetration of the Party line to the masses...
...Effective statecraft on the part of the Communists required that they accommodate their theories to this reality...
...This policy, temporarily halted and reversed during the war, when once again full Jewish loyalty was relied upon in the war against the Nazis, was reinstated and expanded with the war's end...
...But as in the case of the other nationalities, the Jews failed to disappear as a group, and the regime found itself forced into working out an accommodation with irreducible realities, and to recognize the existence of the Jewish national entity, no matter how severely restricted the forms it was allowed to take...
...the Soviet-directed campaign in Italy and France against the Marshall Plan and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization...
...This policy failed utterly, and the Bolsheviks inherited all the problems of rule in a multi-national state...
...Its tragic lineaments are ironically illustrated by the fact that the Jews today are deprived even of the prerogatives presently enjoyed by the Volga Germans, who were deported and dispersed by Stalin during the days of the Nazi invasion of the USSR...
...More forcefully than ever, then, the Soviet leadership came to suspect Jewish loyalty at a time of heightened tension with the West and of growing Soviet antipathy to the new State of Israel...
...But it was not always so, even during the first two-and-one-half decades of the Soviet regime...
...Tsarist policy had for a century and one-half been openly, unmitigatedly and violently anti-Semitic...
...In theory, this policy should have enabled the various national cultures to flourish...
...As Stalin sharpened the cold war against the West, he simultaneously sharpened the war against that group of Soviet citizens who he believed had the closest contacts with and sentiments for the Westthe Jews...
...Such opportunities were indeed created for the Jews as individuals after the Revolution...
...The irony in this situation is that Moscow risks major obloquy for a policy which has proved to be impracticable and untenable...
...It is quite different with Soviet policy toward the Jews, for that policy clearly conflicts with both Soviet constitutional doctrine and the basic internationalist, egalitarian tenets of Marxist-Leninist ideology...
...It meant that the newspapers, schools, books, Party and State organs in the national republics became carbon copies of their Russian counterparts, exactly aping in their own languages the formulae of Moscow...
...They clung to their traditions and cultures and remained obdurately irreducible...
...at most, it attempted to conceal the proportions and the more grisly aspects of the policy, but not its existence...
...Soviet sensitivity on this question has increased as the factual revelations have accumulated in recent years and as the expressions of concern in the non-Communist world have grown more serious and more persistent...
...The various nationalities did have their own territorial republics, their own schools, newspapers and cultural activities in their own languages and even, where they lived as a large enough minority in another republic, specially established schools or, at the very least, additional school lessons in their own languages...
...Their replies, especially those of Premier Khrushchev and Deputy Premier Anastas I. Mikoyan, are given in the next chapter of this report...
...It formally considers the Jews a nationality, as is clear from the internal passport which every Soviet citizen must carry and which lists vital statistical information about the individual...
...To do so would reveal a sharp clash between Soviet constitutional doctrine and the real situation, and, more significantly, a profound contradiction of basic ideology...
...the Berlin Blockade...
...It is thus with increasingly troubled spirits that men of conscience have come to feel and express growing concern in recent years for the plight of the Jews in the Soviet Union...
...And this would be no small thing in a country where Marxist-Leninist ideology, however distorted and diluted, still holds sway an ideology that makes a fetish of "the unity of theory and practice," the correspondence of doctrine to facts and vice versa...
...And so the vicious circle is closed...
...And yet, a Jewish cultural life of sorts was nonetheless permitted in the Yiddish language...
...In short, the effect of its policy has been to constitute Soviet Jewry a peculiarly marginal category of citizens and to isolate them from normal existence...
...Beginning in 1938, therefore, a number of Jewish cultural institutions schools, newspapers, etc.were forcibly closed down, and part of Jewish communal leadership (which had loyally carried through its assigned task of implementing previous Soviet policy to the Jewish community) was liquidated...
...Wholly deprived of the exceedingly few political rights available anywhere in autocratic Russia, the Jews were required to live in a restricted "Pale of Settlement," which consisted chiefly of parts of White Russia, the Ukraine, Bessarabia, Lithuania, Poland and a few other narrow strips of Russian-held territory...
...There they existed in teeming destitution and thorough-going pauperism...
...This reality was that the various national groups refused to be extirpated...
...Socialist in content" was the decisive formulation...
...The Jewish life that was permitted to remain was an attenuated version of its predecessor...
...This shattering blow was, however, only the culmination of a policy that had its beginnings more than a decade earlier, in 1936...
...Grant them political equality and the opportunity to engage in modern, productive economic pursuits, eliminate their religious be nightedness and they would quickly disappear as a group...
...It was a period when Jewish intellectuals were attacked as "rootless cosmopolitans," when Rudolf Slansky and his comrades in Czechoslovakia were tried not only for opposing Moscow but for being agents of an international Jewish conspiracy in the service of Western intelligence, when a group of Soviet Jewish doctors were falsely accused of killing two leading Soviet officials and plotting to kill others, when Jewish leaders were arrested, tried and executed on trumped-up charges of disloyalty and treason, when it was widely believed by Jews and non-Jews alike that Stalin planned to deport the whole of Soviet Jewry to Eastern Siberia and all of this to the tune of an anti-Semitic propaganda campaign reminiscent of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion...
...The Jews were a mere "caste," a vestigial anachronism...
...But a major, though unanticipated, consequence has been a defensive reaction in the form of greater Jewish group consciousness, and alienation from the regime...
...The unique virtue and value of these documents is that they are based almost entirely on Soviet or non-Soviet Communist sources...
...For underlying Soviet policy of the past 20 years and more has been the unwarranted, irrational suspicion that Soviet Jewry is a potentially or actually disloyal group which can be rendered harmless only when it has been fragmented...
...During the past quarter-century in particular, the world has become keenly sensitive, especially as a result of the Nazi experience, to the symbolic role of minorities...
...Despite these extraordinary desperate economic and political circumstances, Jewish cultural, spiritual and intellectual life was at its zenith...
...The Zionist movement was outlawed, and contacts between Soviet Jewry and other Jewish communities throughout the world were largely eliminated...
...The policy even went so far that linguistic experts were assigned to create whole alphabets and even vocabularies for a number of small, dispersed ethnic groups just emerging from backward, semi-nomadic existence...
...But with the purges against the Old Bolsheviks, many of whom were Jews, and especially with the growing possibility of a rapprochement with Nazi Germany in 1938-39, the loyalty of the Jews and their preference for the Soviet regime over the West were called into question...
...They have their own schools in Uzbekistan, and where there are too few of them for that purpose, their children are given special lessons in the Tadjik language and history in the Uzbek schools...
...The three million Jews of the Soviet Union have now reached such a pass that they are deprived of the national prerogatives which even the 3,000 primitive Udege have...
...A case in point is that of the Tadjiksa people of some 1.8 million who, though they have their own republic of Tadjikistan, also live in part as a dispersed minority in neighboring Uzbekistan...
...His regime was not really embarrassed by revelations concerning its policy toward the Jews...
...The need of the Soviet State to rule effectively did not differ essentially from the needs of the Tsars...
...Based on this suspicion, the tacit assumption of the policy has been that discrimination is both inevitable and essential...
...Communal organizations of every description flourished...
...At the outbreak of World War I, there were some five million Jews in the Russian Empire...
...Most of this came to an abrupt end with the Bolshevik Revolution...
...It took the Communist party and State a decade and more to hammer out this accommodation...
...The Nazis, in their anti-Semitism as in all their crimes, appealed to the basest instincts of their followers, and Hitler's barbarities were entirely consistent with the ideology of his movement...
...By the late 1920s, a full-fledged, quite new philosophy emerged, signified by Stalin's famous slogan"national in form, Socialist in content...
...The pattern is irrefutably revealed in the accompanying documents: a pattern of differential treatment in cultural and religious affairs, of discrimination in education and government employment, of denigration of the Jew's social image, of scarcely concealed anti-Semitic prejudices...
...Exciting new ideas, philosophies and movements captured the imagination and inspired the younger generation...
...Though the situation has eased considerably since Stalin's death in 1953...
...We need only recall some of the highlights of that period: the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia...
...That plight, it must be stressed, is not to be compared with their tragic destiny under the Nazis: Covert discrimination, even the most serious deprivation of guaranteed minority rights, is still a far cry from extermination...
...With one sweeping administrative decree late in 1948, Stalin and his cultural commissar, Andrei Zhdanov, eliminated every facet of secular Jewish cultural life and physically exterminated more than 450 Jewish writers, artists and intellectuals the cream of the Soviet Jewish intelligentsia...
...Above all, a first-rate Yiddish theater flourished...
...And the five years after 1948which came to be known among Soviet Jews as "the Black Years"were characterized by a marked heightening of the anti-Semitic content and tone of official policy...
...the basic pattern of the policy remains essentially unchanged...
...Large printing establishments existed in all the centers of Jewish population for the publication of daily newspapers, weekly and monthly journals and hundreds of books, in Yiddish and Hebrew...
...For the Volga Germans now have German schools, radio broadcasts in their own language, and even two newspapers, Neues Leben and Arbeit, in their places of dispersion...
...It is precisely because the Soviet leadership has been so embarrassed by these approaches that it has believed it necessary to deny on every occasion the existence of "a Jewish problem" in the Soviet Union, and of a pattern of anti-Jewish policies...
...Countless academies of traditional Jewish learning existed side-by-side with modern, advanced Hebrew and Yiddish schools...
...The period, 1948-52, was also marked by the heightening of Stalin's paranoid megalomania, as Premier Nikita Khrushchev amply revealed in his famous "secret speech" at the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist party...
...The 40-year period from 1880 to the Revolution witnessed a virtual renascence of Hebrew and Yiddish literature, led by poets, novelists and essayists of genuine distinction...
...In practice, the opposite has been true...
...The documents are grouped around four main themes: "The Absence of Cultural Freedom," "Judaism and the Jewish Image," "Discrimination in Government and Education," and "Prospects and Alternatives...
...Yiddish newspapers, journals and books were published...
...In Tsarist days, Government policy was, with some variations and fluctuations, to Russify the other nationalities forcibly...
...It is the old story of fear of a bogey leading to repression, which in turn makes the bogey real and provides an apparent basis for the fear...
...The Utopian philosophy of cosmopolitan socialism foundered, as had Tsarist policy, on the rock of reality...
...But the case of the 3,000-odd Udege, in Eastern Siberia, is still striking, for they not only had an alphabet and a culture created for them, but had one of their tribesmen, Dransy Komonko, educated at Government expense to become the "national" poet...
...For one thing, the Soviet leadership is far from indifferent to the serious process of disintegration that has been under way for several years in the West European, British, Latin American and North American Communist movements the result, in no small measure, of the traumatic impact of the revelations about Soviet Jewry...
...The shift of Soviet policy toward the Jews beginning in the late '30s is explainable largely in terms of the Soviet leadership's estimate of the relative loyalty of the Jews under changing world circumstances...
...A REPORT BY THE EDITORS JEWS IN THE SOVIET UNION The Soviet Pattern in Perspective THROUGHOUT MODERN history, the treatment of national, racial and religious minorities has been a barometer of social sanity and moral decency...
...To the "Jewish problem," as to the larger nationalities problem, the Bolsheviks brought a rigid ideological orientation: They categorically denied the existence of a Jewish nationality...
...The Soviet Government, as the documents in this report reveal, singles out the Jews for special, differential treatment...
...A network of Yiddish schools, under Party and State supervision, was established...
...In the first decade and one-half, however unmalleable the Jewish group might have been, it could be counted on to be loyal to the regime in preference to Tsarist, White Guard-ist and reactionary forces...
...National in form" remained an empty formality...
...The Hebrew language was banned, and publication of the Bible in Hebrew was prohibited...
Vol. 42 • September 1959 • No. 33
