Library:The Russians Are Coming: The Politics of Anti-Sovietism/Chapter 6: The Jewish Question
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It is not possible to discuss the issue of human rights in the Soviet Union without examining the position of Soviet Jews for there have been repeated accusations in the West that the Soviet authorities practise anti-Semitism. The allegations have been based on claims that Soviet Jews face discrimination in education, employment and in the refusal of the government to allow them an unrestricted right to emigrate. But the Western case is more complex than this for it involves the Soviet attitude to dissent in general. As was seen in the previous chapter, a number of Jews have been arrested and imprisoned for dissident activities but this was in no sense related to their Jewishness. The core of the case concerning Soviet Jews is not about dissent but arises from the fact that on the one hand the West has elevated the right to emigrate as a principal human right and on the other hand the Soviet Union controls emigration and, therefore, regulates the distribution of exit visas to Jews. Claims that Soviet Jews are discriminated against in other ways are made to support that grievance.
Jews and the Revolution
The Jews are a recognized ethnic group in the Soviet Union but, unlike the others, without a natural homeland. They have been concentrated however, in European Russia-in the Soviet Republics of the Ukraine, Byelorussia and Lithuania—in areas annexed initially by Czarist Russia from Poland early in the nineteenth century and described as the Pale of Settlement. There, indeed, they were confined by the Czarist authorities in ghettos, repressed and subjected to frequent pogroms. As they always lived under restrictions their activities were channelled into a narrow occupational range. In 1818, for instance, over 85 per cent of gainfully occupied Jews in Russian controlled
territories were merchants of different kinds-traders, estate managers, tax collectors and money lenders. Most of the remainder were artisans.' As Russia industrialized during the course of the nineteenth century non-Jews competed for the traditional Jewish occupations. The position of the Jewish middleman was undermined. The “state came to monopolise the collection of taxes and the production of liquor . . . intensified domestic production of many goods aided by tariff barriers, ruined the livelihood of many exporters and importers. Capital, credit and jobs formerly generated by the wealthiest elements of the Jewish community dried up as they mobilised funds for external investment in banks, railway construction, sugar-beet and oil production. Modern financial institutions obviated the need for so many petty money-lenders. Aside from the few who became wealthy businessman or highly educated professionals, the members of the Jewish community were thus turned into peddlers, hawkers and small shopkeepers; owners of small, undercapitalised enterprises engaged in the production of clothing or footwear; or artisans employed in those workshops.”2 In the early twentieth century even these activities began to be squeezed by the growth of large-scale capitalist enterprises. Jews became increasingly impoverished, oppressed by a series of government regulations aimed at creating assimilation but which in effect exacerbated already existing prejudices and constantly subjected them to social and physical hostility from the non- Jewish population.
The Jews in Russia, then, had good reason to oppose the Czarist regime and to welcome its overthrow in March 1917. They became free in an instant. “With a strike of the pen the Provisional Government abolished the whole complicated network of laws directed against the Jews. Suddenly their chains fell off. Disabilities and discriminations were cast on the refuse heap . . .”3 But they were not so pleased when the Bolshevik Party seized power in November of that year. There were a number of Jews in leading positions in the Bolshevik Party but by and large they disliked the communist policies aimed at eliminating profit-making and usury from economic activities. The Bolshevik Revolution destroyed the traditional occupations of Jews but placed them in the same position as all other citizens of the new state. There was some reversal to profit-making during the period of the New Economic Policy from 1921 to 1929 but it came to a dramatic and painful halt when the First Five Year Plan in 1929 extended state planning to every sphere of economic activity. The last vestiges of profit-making were removed when agriculture was collectivized in the early 1930s and the property of the kulaks, the rich peasant class, was confiscated. The Jews were forced to adjust to the life expectancies of the majority of ordinary Russians. By 1935 there were three times as many Jewish manual workers as there had been in 1926.4
Many Jews suffered in the upheavals following the Revolution. Pogroms broke out in the Ukraine and Byelorussia during the Civil War, mainly facilitated by the White Russians. “As a result, Jewish attitudes began to shift in a pro-Bolshevik direction from late 1918 onwards: anti-Soviet sympathies came more and more to be associated with pillage and death, Bolshevism with the suppression of anti-Jewish violence.” But their businesses were destroyed nonetheless and their way of life was upset. Once the Soviet government was established there was no further physical violence against the Jews. The social and economic problems they faced had no ethnic causes. As Sidney and Beatrice Webb wrote in 1935 after an intensive study of the Soviet Union: “The condition of thousands of Jewish families in White Russia and the Ukraine is still one of poverty relieved only by the alms of their co-religionists . . . But they suffer, not as Jews but as shopkeepers and moneylenders whose occupation has become unlawful. They are protected from violence as never before. They retain their synagogues and their vernacular speech. Their sons and daughters find all branches of education, and all careers, open to them. Many thousands of families have been assisted to settlement on the land. Wherever there is a group of Jewish families together they have their own local government and their cultural autonomy. They are not prevented from maintaining their racial customs and ceremonies . . .”6
But there were ethnic difficulties, nonetheless, though they did not always arise from the Soviet society. “It cannot be denied“ the Webbs added “that all the blessings of security from pogroms and freedom to enter professions that the USSR accords to the Jews involve, in practice, their acceptance of the Soviet regime; and make, on the whole, for assimilation. The policy of the Soviet Union accordingly meets with persistent opposition, and even denigration, from the world-wide organization of the Zionists, among whom the building up of the “national home“ in Palestine brooks no rival.” The problem posed by Zionism for Soviet Jews simmered until well after the formation of Israel and then, following the Six Day War in 1967, it began to boil.
The Soviet government tried to cope with the influence of Zionism by allocating a piece of virgin territory at Birobidzhan in 1928 as the basis for a Jewish homeland. This land in Eastern Siberia, with no indigenous inhabitants, was half as large as England and was well equipped with resources for agricultural settlements with a climate similar to a Canadian wheat province. It was formally established as a Jewish Autonomous Region in 1934. But it failed to attract an adequate number of Jewish settlers. It had a total population of about 50,000 in 1934, most of whom were Jews. But the Jewish element in the Region declined as Jews became assimilated into Soviet life. About 90 per cent of Soviet Jews chose to live in towns and most of those who worked in agriculture preferred the warmer climate of the Ukraine and the Crimea. Their interest in Yiddish education in general dropped off. There were more than 1000 Yiddish language schools in the early 1930s and at least two dozen Yiddish language newspapers. Between 1928 and 1935 about 3650 books were published in Yiddish.8 All of these activities declined as the pace of industrialization increased and as Jews were drawn into it. Then, with the Second World War most such activities were brought to an abrupt end. But by that time the picture had emerged of Jews becoming preponderantly professional people, experiencing what would be described in the West as 'upward social mobility’. They worked in all major Soviet institutions. They held positions, for example, in the NKVD and had a marked presence in all ranks of the Red Army. During the Second World War, 500,000 Jews served in the armed Services and more than 300 of them were Generals.9
Soviet Jewry in War
The population of approximately 3 million Jews in the Soviet Union in 1939 was largely concentrated in the Ukraine and Byelorussia in the areas bordering Eastern Europe. Another 2 million Jews came under Soviet jurisdiction through the Soviet occupation of Eastern Poland and the addition of Lithuania. Four million of these people lived in areas over-run by the German army after June 1941. The Nazi government, while planning the invasion of the USSR, decided to annihilate the Jews in the territories occupied. Special mobile death units called Einsatz- gruppe were to follow directly behind the frontline troops and round up Jews to be killed. These units were given the special facility to operate “not only in army group rear areas but also in the corps areas right on the front line. This concession was of great importance to the Einsatzgruppe, for the Jews were to be caught as quickly as possible. They were to be given no warning and no chance to escape.”10 An agreement to this effect was signed by Reinhardt Heydrich, the chief of the Reich Security Main Office, at the end of May, 1941. It was generally understood to sanction the killing of Jews, Communists and insane people on the spot. There were four units, totalling about 3,000 men, and led almost without exception by professional men such as a lawyer, a physician, a church pastor and a professional opera singer.
The units were expert killers. In the first wave between June and December, 1941 they murdered half a million Jews mainly through mass shootings at large grave sites. A second wave of killings initiated to take account of those accidentally missed on the first occasion resulted in almost 1 million deaths. The Soviet authorities evacuated many Jews to safe areas. Hilberg reported that “the Einsatzgruppe which operated in the central and eastern Ukrainian territories found that many Jewish communities were reduced by 70-90 per cent and some by 100 per cent. In Melitopol an original Jewish population of 11,000 had dwindled to 2000 before Einsatzgruppe D arrived. Dnepropetrovsk had a pre-war Jewish community of 100,000; about 30,000 remained. In Chernigov, with a pre-war Jewish population of 10,000, Sonderkommando 4a found only 309 Jews. In Mariupol and Taranrog Einsatsgruppe D encountered no Jews at all. On the road from Smolensk to Moscow Einsatzgruppe B reported that in many towns the Soviets had evacuated the entire Jewish population.”11 Altogether about 1,500,000 Jews succeeded in eluding the killing units. These evacuation measures were taken when virtually the whole of Soviet industry was on wheels, being relocated in and beyond the Urals. It was German practice as they entered Soviet territories to encourage the local populace to engage in pogroms against the Jews as a first stage in their genocidal policy. They had some success in those areas which had become part of the Soviet Union since 1939 but in the Soviet Union proper there was no evidence of spontaneous anti-Semitism. A Jewish historian commentated that “In Byelorussia, a conspicuous difference is evidenced between the old Soviet part of the region and the area which had previously belonged to Poland and was under Soviet rule from September 1939 to June 1941. Nazi and anti-Jewish propaganda drew a weak response in the former Soviet Byelorussia: we encounter complaints in Nazi documents that, ‘it is extremely hard to incite the local populace to pogroms because of the backwardness of the Byelorussian peasants with regard to racial consciousness."12 Another view of the cause of the racial attitudes in Byelorussia was given in a secret memorandum by a collaborator to the chief of the German army in August 1942. He wrote: “There is no Jewish problem for the Byelorussian people. For them, this is purely a German matter. This derives from Soviet education which has negated racial difference . . . The Byelorussians sympathize with, and have compassion for the Jews, and regard the Germans as barbarians and the hangman of the Jew, whom they consider human beings equal to themselves . . .”13
There is much evidence provided by survivors themselves to support this view of the Soviet attitude to the Jews.14 Contrary to the general opinion of Jewish docility in the face of Nazi violence there was large-scale Jewish participation in the partisan movement in the German occupied part of Soviet Union. Indeed the German army blamed the Jews for starting guerrilla activity. The German generals had rationalized their co-operation with the killer units “through the pretence that the Jewish population was a group of Bolshevist diehards who instigated, encouraged, and abetted the partisan war behind the German lines. The army thus had to protect itself against the partisan menace by striking at its presumable source - the Jews,”15 This, of course, fitted in with the Nazi inspired belief that there was an international Jewish and Bolshevik conspiracy aimed at undermining Western civilization. The army’s attitude was based on a half-truth for many Jewish families and survivors did take to the forests and fight back. They fought in the same way and for the same purpose as hundreds of thousands of other Soviet citizens. They also suffered and survived in the same way. Jews, Russians and Communists were spoken of in the same breath by the German invaders. The general instruction was that they were to be shot on the spot.
Western Attitudes to Jewish Refugees
While Soviet Jewry was being slaughtered the Germans built six extermination centres in Poland to annihilate the rest of the European Jews. Almost 3 million Jews from most parts of European went to their death in those camps throughout 1942, 1943 and 1944. At first the perpetrators of extermination tried to keep their actions secret. They engaged in secret communications and used code words like final solution for systematic extermination and special treatment for gassing. Nonetheless the news percolated out to the West. News reports were published from July 1941, following the invasion of the Soviet Union, listing and describing massacres. The New York Times carried articles about them. The BBC broadcast news items referring to the numbers killed.16 It was clear in the West by mid 1942 that the Germans were engaged in a mass extermination programme and that all European Jews were at risk. Two million Jews had already been killed. No other evidence should have been needed.
This situation presented a test both of the capacity of Britain and the USA for humanity and of the presence of anti-Semitism. It concerned human rights on a mammoth scale and should be indelibly printed on the memory of history. No nation who failed the test should have ever been able, without hypocracy, to accuse another of anti-Semitism or of infringing human rights. It left scars on all the nations who could have helped, as well as on Germany the perpetrator.
It was a test because there were real opportunities to rescue European Jews. It was not until the end of 1941, just before the ‘Final Solution’ was agreed at the Wansee Conference, that the Jews were finally stopped from leaving Europe. By then almost a million Jewish lives had probably been lost. But there were at least 4.5 million Jews alive then who subsequently died. Some of those millions might have lived.
The question then is, while the Soviet people in all the Republics west of the Urals were struggling for their lives and taking special precautions to evacuate Jews, what were the only two countries which were in a position to help them, namely Britain and the USA, doing? Both countries exercised strict immigration regulations under the influence of anti-Semitic establishment attitudes. Jews began to seek asylum away from Germany as soon as the Nazis came to power in 1933. The British Cabinet expressed its view then for it agreed to “try and secure for this country prominent Jews who were being expelled from Germany and who had achieved distinction whether in pure science, applied sciences, such as medicine or technical industry, music or art. This would not only obtain for this country the advantage of their knowledge and experience, but would create a very favourable impression in the world, particularly if our hospitality were offered with warmth.”17 This hypocritical approach to the vicissitudes of German Jews persisted until the war started. The official British attitude to Jewish immigrants in general was that Britain was a country of transit and not of settlement. Moreover, in so far as Britain accepted Jewish refugees, the government had extracted an understanding from Jewish organizations that the refugees would provide them with financial support so that they would not be a charge on the state.18 In consequence, most Jewish immigrants came through individual and professional contacts. Then from 1939 German and Austrian Jews were treated as enemy aliens so that any admission to Britain had to be on a negotiated basis with the government.
The United States operated a rigidly restrictive immigration quota system which was underpinned by the fear created by the Great Depression that refugees would damage the job prospects of unemployed Americans and by widespread and intense anti- Semitic feelings. The quota system limited the number of immigrants from any particular country in any one year irrespective of circumstances. Germany had a fixed quota and that was that. The Jewish question had no bearing on it. The anti-immigration pressure groups, however, succeeded in keeping the actual numbers admitted to about only 10 per cent of the quota which could have been admitted.19 The US immigration laws, moreover, imposed particular restrictions on Jewish refugees because they contained a prohibition on those ‘likely to become a public charge’.20 From October, 1934, the Nazi government allowed each emigrant to take out only about four dollars. Under Section 7(c) of the 1924 Immigration Act applicants for visas had to produce a police certificate of good character for the previous five years, a record of military service and other data, an almost impossible task for fleeing Jews. The immigration laws reflected public feelings. In 1938 just as the persecution of the Jews was intensified “four separate polls indicated that from 71 to 85 per cent of the American public opposed increasing the quotas to help refugees. And 67 per cent wanted refugees kept out altogether. In a survey taken in early 1939, 66 per cent even objected to a one-time exception to allow 10,000 refugee children to enter outside the quota limits”21 Not surprisingly the USA admitted only slightly more refugees than Britain in the years leading to the war. Altogether between 1933 and 1939, about 370,000 Jews left the German Reich. Of these 57,000 went to the USA and 50,000 to Britain. The remainder went mainly to Palestine, France, Belgium and Switzerland.
The news of the holocaust percolated into Britain and the United States slowly and in an abridged form, often in short articles on the inside pages of newspapers or, as in the case of the BBC on 2 June 1942 with the facts of extermination but without emphasizing that they were part of a programme. It aroused neither governments nor public to action. When, for instance, the Nazis offered to allow 2000 Jews to leave Luxembourg in 1940 the British government refused to admit them into the British Commonwealth: nor in 1942 would it allow 1000 Jewish children to enter Vichy France.23 Britain, of course, controlled the admission of refugees to its then vast Empire and to Palestine. Yet it virtually sealed the refugee outlets from Europe and refused to admit Jews to those countries where it exercised power over entry. As one government official remarked, the British Empire had an absorption capacity of nil when it came to Jewish refugees.24 The British policy on Palestine for the duration of the war was set by a 1939 White Paper which specified that Palestine was not to become a Jewish State, that the sale of land from Arabs to Jews was to be restricted and that even though “His Majesty’s Government are conscious of the present unhappy plight of large numbers of Jews who seek a refuge from certain European countries’,25 a quota of 10,000 immigrants a year for the next five years was to be imposed, though “as a contribution towards the solution of the Jewish refugee problems, 25,000 refugees will be admitted as soon as the High Commissioner is satisfied that adequate provision for their maintenance is ensured . . ,”26 The constant flow of illegal immigrants into Palestine during the 1930s was intensified after the Nazis moved into Poland and the Soviet Union. This law-breaking activity offended the British official mind so that during the war the British authorities were pre-occupied with preventing the rescue of Jews. Coastal patrol vessels intercepted refugee ships approaching Palestine, diverted them, sent them back, even fired on them. The ships, packed with fleeing people under inhuman, insanitary conditions, were left without food and provisions, sometimes for months.27 The British with a perverted sense of fairness, after putting the illegal immigrants in internment camps, subtracted their number from the official quotas.
Both Britain and the USA refused to bomb Auschwitz as a means of stopping the extermination process there.28 Auschwitz operated as a killing centre for 32 months. The average rate of killings for the whole period was about 4,100 per day. About half of those were Jews while the majority of the remainder were Soviet prisoners of war. When the proposals to bomb it were made the camp was operating at its maximum which could have been as high as 6000 killings each day.
The American record on refugees was no better than that of the British. The British public showed more understanding of the Jewish tragedy towards the end of the war than did its government for in the USA the public remained implacably opposed to allowing Jewish refugees into their country. After the appalling facts of genocide were known, 78 per cent of a sample asked whether “it would be a good idea or a bad idea to let more immigrants come into this country after the war” thought it was a bad idea. And at the end of 1945, with news of millions of displaced persons in Europe, only 5 per cent in the poll thought the USA should admit more immigrants than before the war.29 Government practice was consistent with public opinion. It is best described by David S Wyman in his detailed study of the American responses to the holocaust. He concluded that:
“1. The American State Department and the British Foreign Office had no intention of rescuing large numbers of European Jews. On the contrary, they continually feared that Germany or other Axis nations might release tens of thousands of Jews into Allied hands. Any such exodus would have placed intense pressure on Britain to open Palestine and on the United States to take in more Jewish refugees, a situation the two great powers did not want to face. Consequently, their policies aimed at obstructing rescue possibilities and dampening public pressures for government action.# Authenticated information that the Nazis were systematically exterminating European Jewry was made public in the United States in November 1942. President Roosevelt did nothing about the mass murder for fourteen months, then moved only because he was confronted with political pressures he could not avoid and because his administration stood on the brink of a nasty scandal over its rescue policies.
- The War Refugee Board, which the President then established to save Jews and other victims of the Nazis, received little power, almost no co-operation from Roosevelt or his administration, and grossly inadequate government funding. (Contributions from Jewish organizations, which were necessarily limited, covered 90 per cent of the WRB’s costs). Through dedicated work by a relatively small number of people, the WRB managed to help save approximately 200,000 Jews and at least 20,000 non-Jews.# Because of State department administrative policies, only 21,000 refugees were allowed to enter the United States during the three and one half years the nation was at war with Germany. That amounted to 10 per cent of the number who could have been legally admitted under the immigration quotas during that period.
- Strong popular pressure for action would have brought a much fuller government commitment to rescue and would have produced it sooner. Several factors hampered the growth of public pressure. Among them were anti-Semitism and anti-immigration attitudes, both widespread in American society in that era and both entrenched in Congress; the mass media’s failure to publicize Holocaust news, even though the wire services and other news sources made most of the information available to them; the near silence of the Christian churches and almost all of their leadership; the indifference of most of the nation's political and intellectual leaders; and the President’s failure to speak out on the issue.30
There was no mention in the West during the almost indescribably harrowing years for European Jews from 1933 until 1945 of the hallowed right to emigrate. There was much sanctimonious rhetoric about human rights but no action. One statistic encapsulates the sense of the period: for the whole year of 1944, 5,606 refugees, mostly Jews, were allowed into the United States.31 This was less than the daily rate of killing at one killing centre, Auschwitz, in the same year. When the whole macabre picture of mass extermination had been unfolded, eight days after the end of the war with Germany, Mr Herbert Morrison, the Labour leader who was the British wartime Home Secretary, made his views about Jewish refugees known to the Cabinet:
“as regards such persons [refugees] in the United Kingdom he was clear that we ought to act on the assumption that those who had come here had done so temporarily, and that they should eventually go back whence they came. It was often said that the Jewish refugees in this country were terrified of returning to Germany. We should not be influenced by this attitude. It was possible that post-war Germany would abandon anti-Semitism altogether. If the Jews were allowed to remain here they might be an explosive element in the country, especially if the economic situation deteriorated.”32
The question of resettling refugees, many of whom were Jews, after the war continued to be a sensitive human rights issue but it ceased to be focussed only on Britain and the USA. Jews were able to travel to a multiplicity of countries. The creation of Israel as an independent Jewish state in 1948 provided displaced Jews with a homeland. From 1948 until the Yom Kippur War in 1973 it was the rise of Israel in a hostile Arab environment which dominated the attention of the West towards Jews. Israel, based primarily on American capital, became a Middle-East outpost for US imperialism and, therefore, a strategic participant in the Cold War. It became the sensitizer for anti-Semitism and played its part by focussing on the treatment of Soviet Jewry. In doing so, Israel provided the West with a powerful ideological weapon in its campaign of anti-Sovietism. Its litmus test was simple: opposition to Zionism in general and Israel in particular constituted antiSemitism. The Soviet Union, as Sidney and Beatrice Webb learned, was highly critical of Zionism in the inter-war years. Yet ironically, it was support from the Soviet Union, against ambivalence by the USA, which ensured the de jure creation of Israel in 1948. The Soviet view was put succinctly by Mr Andrei Gromyko, then the Soviet Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, in a speech before the General Assembly of the United Nations on 14 May 1947. He said: “The aspirations of a considerable part of the Jewish people are linked with the problems of Palestine . . . During the last World War indescribable pain and suffering were experienced by the Jews . . . This fact . . . explains the Jews’ aspirations to establish their own State. It would be unjust to ignore or to deny the right of the Jewish people to realize this aspiration.”33 The USSR was amongst the first countries to give Israel diplomatic recognition. This initial enthusiasm became a casualty of Israel’s commitment to the USA during the Cold War. It was reported in Colliers, a widely circulated American magazine, in October 1951, that Israel had agreed to act as a bombing base for the USA in the event of a nuclear war with the USSR.34 The Soviet leader, Mr Nikita Khrushchev, stated the Soviet attitude in May 1957 when he said: “Our position towards Israel is determined by the Cold War, and we hope that this is a passing phenomenon.”35 The Soviet Union supported the Arab states in their successive wars against Israel and has backed the Palestinian Arabs in their struggle for independence. After the 1967 Six Day War in which Israel was victorious, the Soviet Union broke off diplomatic relations with Israel and they have not yet been restored.
The Process of Assimilation
Israel’s role in the Cold War, combined with a vision of Zionism as an international capitalist conspiracy, created a paranoia in the leadership of the Soviet Communist Party after 1948 about the intentions of some leading Soviet Jewish intellectuals. There was no real evidence that the Jewish intellectuals were disloyal but from 1948 until after Stalin’s death in 1953 there was no tolerance for those whose loyalty appeared to be to Zionism rather than the Soviet Union. In 1948 the entire system of Yiddish language teaching was suppressed. Twenty-five Soviet Jewish leaders, many of them Communists, were arrested, tried and executed. For five or more years Jewish intellectuals were intimidated. There was a frame-up of Jewish doctors in which they were accused of planning to use medical means to kill off Soviet leaders. About 430 members of the Jewish intelligentsia were sent to concentration camps where many of them died. This blot on the record of Soviet ethnic relations has left stains which are difficult to erase. Yiddish language teaching has been resumed and Yiddish publications are appearing again. But affirmative action cannot eradicate fear quickly or easily.
Although many Soviet Jews were undoubtedly affected by the purge of their intellectual elite the vast majority of Jews were not materially threatened. Those, ranging from L M Kaganovich, a Bolshevik since 1911, Politburo member since 1930 and the wartime head of the Soviet railways, to Jewish generals, managers, scientists, doctors, teachers and workers in collective farms and state farms as well as mines and factories, lived as before and continued the process of occupational development which had been interrupted by the war. Soviet society at large had not been afflicted by anti-Semitism. There had been no measures to discredit Jewishness. Yiddish continued to be spoken in Jewish homes though a declining proportion described it as their native language. In 1959 this proportion was 21.5 whereas in 1979 it had fallen to 14.24. In 1926 it had been 72.6. This recent decline was partly the result of the emigration of Yiddish speaking Jews in the 1970s and partly because of an increasing tendency of Soviet Jews, like those in all other countries, to speak the language of the country to which they belonged.
The population of Soviet Jews declined from 2.3 million in 1959 to 1.8 million in 1979, representing only 0.7 per cent of the total population. This decline resulted mainly from a low fertility rate among Jewish women, a high percentage of mixed marriages, the children of whom were not registered as Jews, and emigration.36 Almost 74 per cent of Soviet Jewry is now concentrated in the Russian and Ukranian Republics but, as the following table shows, in no Republic do Jews constitute more than 2.03 per cent of its total population. The vast majority are second generation urban dwellers; indeed in the 1970 census only 2.1 per cent were classified as rural. 26 per cent lived in Moscow, Leningrad and Kiev. The rest were scattered in relatively small cities.
Soviet Jewry is not a homogeneous group. It consists of different types and degrees of Jewishness. The main distinction is between the ‘heartland’ and the ‘periphery’. About three- quarters of Soviet Jewry live in the ‘heartland’ which comprises these areas which have been part of the Soviet Union for two generations. These people have experienced the greatest degree of assimilation in Soviet society. They tend not to be religious. They generally live where there are no centres of Jewish social or religious activity. They are highly educated. Many of them belong to mixed families. These factors have been both a consequence and a cause of assimilation. They have reinforced the assimilation process. It “is generally agreed”, Zaslavsky and Brym commented, “that degree of Jewish identity varies inversely with level of education and rate of out-marriage, and proportionately with use of Jewish language”.39
The periphery consists largely of the Baltic Republics which have had only a post-Second World War experience of belonging to the Soviet Union and where, in consequence, the assimilation process has been relatively brief, anti-Semitic forces have not been entirely eradicated and Jewish traditions have tended to survive. The periphery also includes Georgia, Uzbekistan, Azerbaidzhán and the mountain regions of the Caucasus. There, many Jews are non-Ashkenazi Jews whose origins lie in Persia rather than Germany and for whom religion is still a vital component of their lives. They are Messianic and regard the creation of Israel as the ultimate Jewish objective. They live in small, traditionally based communities where their activities have changed little since the Revolution. For these reasons the non-Ashkenazi Jews have possessed the highest level of Jewishness amongst all Soviet Jews. But they were a minority, numbering only between 50,000 and 60,000 during the post-war years till 1970.
TABLE I
THE DISTRIBUTION OF JEWS IN THE USSRACCORDING TO THE 1979 CENSUS37
| REPUBLIC | NUMBER
OF (000’s) |
% OF TOTAL POPULATION | % OF
SOVIET JEWS |
% URBAN IN38 1970 |
| RSFSR | 701 | 0.51 | 38.7 | 97.4 |
| Ukraine | 634 | 1.27 | 35.0 | 98.3 |
| Byelorussia | 135 | 1.41 | 7.5 | 98.3 |
| Uzbekistan | 100 | 0.65 | 5.5 | 97.0 |
| Moldavia | 80 | 2.03 | 4.4 | 97.8 |
| Georgia | 28 | 0.56 | 1.6 | 98.3 |
| Azerbaidzhán | 35 | 0.58 | 1.9 | 98.8 |
| Latvia | 28 | 1.11 | 1.6 | 99.1 |
| Lithuania | 15 | 0.44 | 0.8 | 99.1 |
| Tadzhikistan | 15 | 0.40 | 0.8 | 98.7 |
| Estonia | 5 | 0.34 | 0.3 | 97.7 |
| Kazakhstan | 95.3 | |||
| Kirkiziya | 95.6 | |||
| Turkmenia | 98.5 | |||
| Armenia | 35 | 0.15 | 1.93 | 97.1 |
| TOTAL | 1,881 | 0.69 | 100.00 | 97.9 |
The socio-economic position of Jews was transformed after the revolution “from a destitute community engaged in occupations with no future into an exceedingly highly educated group placed well up in the Soviet system of social stratification ... In less than two generations the majority had undergone a series of metamorphoses from peddler to physician, shop-keeper to research scientist, artisan to engineer . . .”40 A critical commentator added that “A remarkably upward social mobility, based on the acquisition of higher education, transformed the Soviet Jews in just two generations. Instead of being a community dislocated by war and concentrated mainly in the starving market towns of the former Pale of Settlement, as they were in the first years of the advent of Soviet rule, they are now a cultural, technical and scientific elite . . . This is a success story which rivals, and perhaps overshadows the economic and social achievements of North American Jewry . . .”41 A similar point was made by Zaslavsky and Brym when they stated that “it is an entirely open question whether the Jews’ rate of upward mobility in the USA - ‘the land of golden opportunities’ - has been at all higher”.42
The evidence of the prominence of Soviet Jewry in Soviet intellectual life is compelling. Jews are by far the most highly educated ethnic group. The number with a university education is four times the national average. Their position in graduate education is even more pronounced. In 1973 there were more Jewish doctors of science in absolute terms than from any other ethnic group except the Russians. For example, although there were 41 million Ukrainians, the Jews, with a population of just over 2 million, had twice as many doctors of science. In 1973, Jews represented 0.9 per cent of the total Soviet population but 1.9 per cent of all university students, 6.1 per cent of scientific workers, 8.8 per cent of all scientists and 14.0 per cent of all doctors of science.43 This disparity was greater in the main urban centres. In Moscow, for instance, where Jews were 3 per cent of the population in 1970 they comprised 13.6 per cent of all scientists and 17.4 per cent of doctors of science, the equivalent in Britain of university professorships. In that same year the number of people from the top six different ethnic groups who had completed higher education, for every 10,000 persons over the age of 10 years were as follows44: Jewish, 239; Georgian, 155; Armenian, 76; Estonian, 66; Russian, 60; Ukrainian, 58.
This picture was part of a changing process in which educational opportunities were being equalized by affirmative state action. Jews were early beneficiaries of affirmative action and, as a result, developed both the expectation that their children should reach at least equivalent educational standards and the environmental facilities to make that possible. If there had been no contemporary administrative intervention in regulating access to higher education then Jews as an ethnic group would have become an established educational elite at the expense of other ethnic groups whose cultural and environmental characteristics had disadvantaged them. The consequence for Jews is that they constitute a declining proportion of the Soviet student body. In 1960 they made up 3.2 per cent of the student body but only 2.3 per cent in 1970. This decline has continued.45 They were 15.5 per cent of all scientific workers in 1950 but only 6.9 per cent in 1970. The declining Jewish involvement in higher education is in part the negative side of afffirmative action favouring other ethnic groups. They are not alone, however. The number of Estonian graduates fell by 20 per cent between 1970 and 1973 while the number of Armenian and Georgian graduates fell by 10 per cent. There are other factors. Official Soviet policy is to preserve a certain proportion of available university places for the children of workers and peasants. In the Law Faculty of Moscow University, for example, such people are given 20 per cent of first year places. The children of the intelligentsia could easily fill all the places. Because Jews figure prominantly in the intelligentsia some Jewish applicants are bound to be unsuccessful. Within the Republics university selection procedures favour local ethnic majorities and this operates against Russians, Ukrainians and others as well as Jews who may be local minorities in all Republics. Irrespective of all other factors which influence the entrance of ethnic groups to higher education, there was a rapid and tremendous expansion in higher education in general and scientific training in particular from the 1950s which was bound to upset the ethnic balance at the time by creating its own influences. From the early 1970s Jewish emigration raised the age structure of Soviet Jewry. Between 1971 and 1976 it is estimated that about half of the emigrants were under the age of thirty thus diminishing the volume of Jewish applicants to universities for a number of years.46
Given the number and variety of pressures shaping the ethnic character of higher education in the Soviet Union since the end of the Second World War it is virtually impossible to identify ‘official anti-Semitism’ as a dominant influence. Even where discrimination against Jews can be identified this is more likely to be part of the equalizing process than a racist act. Jews, very much like other ethnic groups, have to compete in the increasingly intense competition for university places; they may have to search for places amongst the non-prestigious institutions in outlying Republics where the minority quotas have not been filled; they may be compelled to enrol as factory or agricultural workers either permanently or until they can gain access to higher education. In each of these situations the sensation of exclusion may feel like discrimination but it is a widely-shared experience without any racial basis.
One other factor relating to the assimilation of Jews into Soviet society is their membership of the Communist Party. Jews have figured prominently as communists. Zinoviev, Kamenev, Radek, Trotsky and Sverdlov were Bolshevik leaders during the Revolution. Jacob Sverdlov was President of Bolshevik Russia during Lenin’s time. Since then Jews have played a prominent though changing role in the Communist Party. A quarter of the membership of the Central Committee was Jewish in the 1920s while they comprised almost 5 per cent of the total Party membership. Their involvement in the leadership declined from the 1930s. L M Kaganovitch in Stalin’s administration was the last Jewish member of the Politburo. It was to be expected, that as the Communist Party grew and a large non-Jewish urban intelligentsia emerged, the Jewish involvement in it would diminish. It did so but not in proportion to its position in the total population. In 1976, 294,774 out of the 16 million Party members were Jews, representing 1.9 per cent. This meant that one out of every six or seven Jews eligible to join the Party had applied and been accepted into it. The actual rate of application was most probably higher because most Jewish applicants would have been intellectuals who had a restricted access to the Party compared with workers. Nonetheless Jews had the highest rate of Party affiliation of any ethnic group at 137 per thousand compared with the next highest, the Georgians, with 80 per thousand. Put differently, at least 13.7 per cent of the total Jewish population from 1970 were members of the Communist Party. They were the most “Party-saturated” Soviet nationality,4 despite intensified anti-Sovietism by Jewish groups in the West.
The generalized picture of Soviet Jewry then is that it is highly urbanized with at least 80 per cent living in cities, mostly without Jewish communities or access to Jewish religious or cultural activities. It is highly educated and forms a significant segment of Soviet scientific and technological intelligentsia. Many Jews occupy leading positions in Soviet institutions. They have a social status which is commensurate with their educational attainments. Their material well-being is high by Soviet standards partly because of their occupations, partly because they have small families and partly because they are urbanized. Their commitment to the communist system is expressed through their disproportionate presence in the Communist Party. In the main, the relative position of the Jews is deteriorating but this is largely because previously disadvantaged ethnic and occupational groups are encroaching on them.
Igor Birman, an economist who emigrated from the USSR in 1974 assessed the position of Soviet Jews as follows: “Zionist- oriented Jews . . . are a distinct minority. The great mass of Soviet Jewry has been thoroughly assimilated. Few know Yiddish and almost no one knows Hebrew . . . Even the most casual observer must admit that the number of believing and practising Jews is extremely small . . . Thorough assimilation and antireligious feeling are in large measure ... a result of education. From this also springs a lively interest in cultural values, and the over-whelming majority of Soviet Jews have become people of Russian culture in the broadest sense of the word, not solely in terms of language. For all practical purposes little remains in the country of the Jewish cultural tradition; thus, the majority of Jews have embraced Russian culture, literature and even history as their own.”48 The exceptions to this picture were mainly to be found amongst the half a million Ashkenazi Jews in the regions of the ‘periphery' and the non-Ashkenazi Jews who resided mainly in Georgia. The social position of many of those Jews was similar to that of Jews in the ‘heartland’ but there were factors in their environment which obstructed assimilation. This, then, was the situation when large-scale Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union began in 1971.
The Soviet Attitude to Jewish Emigration
The general description of Soviet Jewry, then, is of a relatively privileged minority which is distinguishable from the rest of Soviet intelligentsia only by the nationality entries in their internal passports. They generally live dispersed with other Soviet citizens in urban communities, revealing their Jewishness either in their inner family relationships or even, perhaps, concealing it in their own minds. In all objective respects most of them are as other Soviet citizens except that they derive more social benefits from Soviet society than the rest.
Why then is there such an outcry in the West about the condition of Soviet Jewry? Why is the Soviet Union abused as an oppressive society for its attitude to Jews and described as antiSemitic? And why, more particularly, should about 256,450 Jews have emigrated to Israel and the USA in the decade following 1971? What contradictions in their lives caused so many to leave Soviet society?
Many people have offered answers. Peter Ustinov, for instance, wrote: “If today there are demonstrations in the United States and elsewhere in support of Soviet Jewry, it is largely because of the creation of the State of Israel, and the reluctance of the Soviet Government to allow an exodus in the direction of a National Home to the creation of which it was amongst the first to subscribe.”49 A different perspective was expressed by William Mandel who wrote that “The interest in Soviet Jews in the United States and Canada is a consequence of their numbers, not in the USSR, but here in the United States. Of all the Americans with roots in what is now Soviet territory, Jews are the most numerous, actually outnumbering the Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Armenians and all the others combined.”50 Most explanations, however, published in the popular press and those learned journals which have arisen to analyze Soviet Jewry point the finger at the Soviet Union and accuse it of totalitarianism because it refuses to grant the primary and elementary freedom to emigrate. They state that anti-Semitism is the cause of the exodus.
The Soviet Union has an attitude to emigration which is contrary to that currently prevalent in the West. There are two aspects to it. One concerns the rational use of resources while the other stems from socialist morality. The Soviet Union has experienced full employment since the beginning of the Second Five Year Plan in 1934. In effect it has been short of labour, a situation seriously worsened by the casualties of the Second World War. Thus the labour situation imposed on the Soviet Government a dire need to conserve labour power by preventing wastages to other countries as well as by controlling its domestic utilization. Both types of measures would, in any event, have resulted from the government’s use of centralized planning measures. It would have been illogical and self-defeating to plan the use of all resources except labour power. The planned use of labour, however, involved restricting the right of individuals to take their skills to another country.
There is a moral argument against free emigration. If, for instance, the emigration of a physician prevents a community from having adequate health care whose right should be given priority? Should the doctor’s right to leave the society be protected or should the community’s right to health care be upheld? The issue has been crudely expressed through the experience of India where the unrestricted emigration of skilled medical practitioners to Western countries has been allowed while in India itself there have been less than 3 doctors for every 10,000 population compared with more than 15 doctors in Britain and more than 20 doctors in the USA for every 10,000 population. The problem is resolved in a socialist society through the predominance of collectivist values over individualistic ones so that the interests of individuals are not allowed to have priority over those of a community. There is, therefore, no moral dilemma for the Soviet Union when presented with requests from skilled personnel to emigrate. It simply asks whose interests would be affected and in what ways and then takes the side of the community.
There are then strong material reasons to account for the Soviet Union’s reluctance to agree to emigration. But it has in no sense been a closed society. It has received people, mainly political refugees who would have been unwelcome in the West or who were actually fleeing from the West. And it has permitted controlled emigration in order to repatriate people to their homelands and to re-unify families which were broken up by the Second World War.
Groups of Koreans moved into Siberia after 1917 in order to escape Japanese oppression. They have maintained their language and culture though they are now permanent residents in the Soviet Union. One such group formed the “Politotdel” collective farm in 1925, 15 kilometres from Tashkent in Uzbekistan and they still run it as one of the most successful farm units in the Soviet Union. Spaniards fled to the Soviet Union during the Civil War as did many Greeks after their Civil War in 1949. A large number of Poles fled to the Soviet Union to escape from the invading German army in 1939. Repatriation agreements were concluded between the Soviet government and the governments of Spain, Greece and Poland. The Spanish agreement was concluded after 1977 because between 1939 and 1977 there were no diplomatic ties between Spain and the Soviet Union. The Greek repatriation began in 1965 and within about 2 years between 4,000 and 6,000 Greeks returned to their homeland. The first agreement covering Poles in the Soviet Union was concluded in September 1944. This gave individuals of Polish and Jewish nationality who were Polish citizens on 17 September 1939, the day the Soviet armies occupied Eastern Poland, the right to evacuate to Poland. This agreement was implemented during the first year after the war. A second agreement was signed in March 1957 to assist the voluntary repatriation of those Poles who had not been able to take advantage of the earlier agreement because of circumstances beyond their control. A special clause enabled Jews who had been Polish citizens to return to Poland with their families and it has been estimated that 25,000 actually left the USSR for Poland at the time. Altogether about 1.5 million Poles, including about 175,000 Jews, were repatriated in this way.51 About 14,000 Armenians who had moved to the Soviet Republic of Armenia in the years following the Second World War from the middle East, including Palestine, were allowed to emigrate to the USA between 1976 and 1980. In most cases this emigration was to re-unify families. This principle, plus the right to return to the homeland were at the basis of an agreement between the governments of the Soviet Union and the Federal Republic of Germany in 1958 to repatriate the million or so Germans who for one reason or another resided in the Soviet Union.
All of this emigration was voluntary but none of it was individual. No person had the right to emigrate outside the terms of the agreements or without the permission of the Soviet government which regulated entry into and exit from the Soviet Union with Statutes passed by the USSR Council of Ministers. These Statutes made no mention of any nationalities. They were loosely worded and allowed some scope for administrative discretion in their application. Those Jews who were not covered by bilateral agreements had to seek exist visas through the normal, difficult channels. There was no agreement with Israel.
The Impact of Aggressive Zionism
Israel created a special situation for Jews who wished to emigrate for it granted them automatic immigration rights. It had no immigration quotas, no visa formalities for them. Indeed the state was based on the right of every Jew to emigrate to it. When the first statute on immigration, the Law of Return, was being introduced into the Israeli Parliament in 1950 by the Prime Minister, David Ben Gurion, he said:
“This law does not provide for the State to bestow the right to settle in Israel upon the Jew living abroad; it affirms that this right is inherent in him, from the very fact of his being a Jew. The State does not grant the right of return to the Jews of the diaspora. This right preceded the State; this right built the State; its source is to be found in the historic and never broken connection between the Jewish people and the homeland."52
The first legislative act of the Israeli Provisional Council of State abolished the mandatory restrictions on Jewish immigration which the British had imposed. The second was the Law of Return which spelled out the details behind Ben Gurion's statement. This asserted the right of every Jew to immigrate and declared that every Jew who expressed the desire to settle in Israel should receive an immigrant’s visa. In practice this meant that Jews could become Israeli citizens simply by landing in Israel. The Nationality Amendment Law of 1971 extended this right to Jews who merely expressed a desire to emigrate to Israel but were unable to leave their existing countries. It was expressly intended for Soviet Jews who were being refused permission to emigrate to Israel. Thus the Ministry of the Interior in Israel could grant a Jew Israeli nationality before immigrating. The law created dual nationality by unilateral action and in the face of Soviet opposition.
With the creation of Israel, Jewish nationalism turned on all forces which hampered its growth, in particular those countries which refused to give Jews the freedom to emigrate as they wished. It turned, therefore, on the Soviet Union. During Stalin’s time there was no officially endorsed Jewish emigration. Some Jews left the Soviet Union in the chaos of the post-Second World War. Indeed one of the charges against Jewish intellectuals in 1952 was they had aided and abetted the smuggling of Jews to Palestine. After 1953 there was a trickle of emigrants wholly for family re-unification purposes and largely comprising old people. The rate was about 18 per month from 1955 to 1964. It rose to a monthly average of 150 in the 2.5 years prior to the Six Day War in 1967. Jewish emigration was stopped entirely at the end of the Six Day War and did not really start again until 1971.
The Six Day War in 1967, in which Israel defeated the Egyptians and the Syrians, was a catalyst for Jewish emigration. It had two main consequences. The Soviet Union had supported the Arab states. Israel, through its victory, was seen more clearly than hitherto as an instrument of American capitalism, as America’s armed camp in the Middle East. The Soviet Union saw Zionism as an instrument of the Cold War, a ‘fifth column’ operating within its own frontiers, undermining communism. It turned, in consequence, against any manifestation of Zionism, no matter how innocent it might have been. Since the brief, transient endorsement of a Jewish state in 1947, the Soviet Union had become increasingly aware of Israel’s role in international capitalism. 1967, therefore, was not qualitatively different. It simply produced a clearer picture.
The second consequence was more dramatic for it was the resurgence of a confident aggressive Zionism which regarded the Soviet Union as its main target. There was a revival of Zionist sentiment among Soviet Jews. There was a more pronounced expression of what was described as the “infrastructure of Jewish unofficial spiritual life in the USSR”. Study circles for learning Hebrew, Jewish literature, music and history, were formed.53 In some areas of the Soviet Union the process of Jewish assimilation into Soviet life was halted and put in reverse. There were undoubtedly contradictions in the lives of Soviet Jews which were sensitive to external pressures. The victory in the Six Day War touched chords which some Soviet Jews did not know existed. The Zionist campaign throughout the Western world about the treatment of Soviet Jewry ensured that they would not be allowed to forget they were there.
Organizing Emigration
The basic work of providing the media with its copy about Soviet Jewry was done by Western Jewish intellectuals who analyzed and re-analyzed every facet of the emigration process, starting invariably from the assumption that Soviet Jews were persecuted and, in spite of the evidence, concluding by confirming the assumption. In the Jewish euphoria following the Six Day War the Institute of Jewish Affairs in London, in association with the World Jewish Congress, published the Bulletin on Soviet and East European Jewish Affairs. This was replaced by Soviet Jewish
Affairs in June 1971 to cover “the entire range of knowledge directly or indirectly relevant to an understanding of the position and prospect of Jews in the USSR and the Communist-governed countries of Eastern Europe including historical and contextual aspects.” This Journal, published twice yearly, has dealt with “the Jewish question” ever since. Its first article was “The ‘Right to Leave’”; later ones were “Soviet Jews and Israeli Citizenship”, “New Soviet Laws on Emigration”; “Emigration from the USSR”; “Freedom of Emigration of Soviet Jewry”. The theme of each issue has remained the same through to 1987. The February 1985 issue was devoted to the proceedings of the “Experts’ Conference on Soviet Jewry” which dealt with “The Jewish Question in the USSR”, “The Emigration of Soviet Jews” and “Anti-Jewish Discrimination in Education and Employment”. In September, 1986, a new Journal appeared in Britain called the Journal of the Academic Proceedings of Soviet Jewry with an academically impressive editorial board. Its pre-publication publicity stated that its authors should be “Jews resident within the Soviet Union; or authors of works presented to such persons; or Jews who, while no longer resident, have undertaken the work, which is the subject of the contribution, while resident in the Soviet Union.” Its purpose is self-evident. It stated that it would “chart the circumstances of a highly developed population, many of whom are constrained against their will . . .” All in all no facets of the lives of Soviet Jewry are nowadays left unexplored.
Propaganda was intense and highly effective. Small sounds left the Soviet Union and returned as resonant echoes.54 Soviet Jewish protagonists of emigration became household names in the West as Western governments took up their cases with the Soviet government. They made the relaxation of restrictions on Jewish emigration a condition for progress in negotiations over trade and over arms reduction. The most publicized of the Jewish emigrants were courted by the President of the USA and the Prime Minister of Britain. The question of Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union was converted into a major human rights issue.
The campaign was not simply to convince the world that Soviet Jews suffered from discrimination but to persuade Soviet Jews to emigrate and for this reason it was taken into the Soviet Union. Western radio stations, for example the BBC and the Voice of America, conveyed Western perceptions about Israeli and Soviet affairs to Soviet listeners. Radio Liberty in West Germany specialized in broadcasting material critical of the Soviet Union. The most important part, however, was played by the Voice of Israel whose contribution was described as follows:
“While the Israelis were absent from the Soviet Union after 1967, the Voice of Israel was instrumental in helping Soviet Jews affirm their positive identification with Israel. The impact of the Voice of Israel . . . was certainly important ... It was perhaps the only radio station outside the USSR that contributed to an important socio-political movement within the Soviet Union. The Voice of Israel was widely heard by diverse groups of Soviet Jews "55
Zionist dissident groups were formed both to communicate with the West and to translate its propaganda into internal political action. They linked with other dissident groups and used similar methods to publicize their case, such as letters of protest to leading members of the government and the Communist Party and for publication in the West. In the autumn of 1969 when the Israeli government began its widely publicized campaign for the free emigration of Soviet Jews to Israel, Mrs Golda Meir, the Prime Minister of Israel, publicized one such letter signed by 18 Jews in Georgia while Israel’s Permanent Representative at the United Nations presented it to a press conference in New York. The Zionist groups organized the transition from individual to collective protest. They distributed clandestinely produced political journals which Russian, Lithuanian and Ukrainian emigré publishing houses, daily newspapers, literary and political journals then published in the West. The US government financed Radio Liberty in Munich employed a research staff to collect every scrap of this “Samizdat” or self-published material and collate it in a “Samizdat Archive”. Since 1972 the processed contents of the Archive have been available in four American and four European Libraries, including the Library of Congress in Washington and the British Museum in London. Radio Liberty has published its own research papers and has become a major source of critical data. Thus, whatever the motives of the writers of the “Samizdat” material, it has been used in the West for anti-Soviet purposes.
Propaganda was one arm of the Zionist campaign. The other was a network of institutional support for the actual emigration of Soviet Jews. A number of Western Jewish organizations such as the American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress, the World Jewish Congress and the National Council for Soviet Jewry, provided material assistance. In Israel, the Ministry of Immigrant Absorption and the Jewish Agency, with its own network of international representatives, performed major coordinating functions. The main link between the source of immigrants and Israel has been provided by the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS). This body has dealt only with those who were registered as Jews in their internal passports. Other Jews and non-Jews who wished to emigrate with Israeli visas have been assisted by the International Rescue Committee and the Tolstoy Foundation. At the diplomatic level in Moscow the question of Jewish exit visas has been handled since 1967 by the Dutch Embassy which represents Israeli interests in the Soviet Union in the absence of normal diplomatic relations. The final say was had by the Department for Visas and Registrations of the Ministry of Interior of the USSR (OVIR), which distributes emigration visas.
The Soviet Union has remained consistent in its approach to emigration by being opposed to emigration as such but in favour of repatriation to a homeland and the re-unification of families. As Israel was not recognized as a homeland for Soviet citizens the only recourse Soviet Jews had was to seek re-unification with families in Israel. For this purpose, they were required to supply an affidavit, received by post from a relative in Israel, which was an invitation confirming the family relationship. This vyzov was supplied by the Jewish Agency on request. Many Jewish families had been scattered by the war and Nazi occupation and some, in its aftermath, were distributed between the USSR and Eastern Europe on the one hand and Israel and the USA on the other. There were genuine reasons for re-unification.
Family re-unification was not a clear-cut issue for most of those who wished to emigrate to join families were leaving families behind. The Soviet authorities, conscious of the situation, stated their attitude as follows:
“We are in favour of families being re-united, but not infrequently we are faced with a situation in which the wish of some persons to leave the country in order to be “re-united with relatives” actually leads to the disintegration of existing families and relations between relatives: children leave parents, parents leave children, husbands divorce wives and vice-versa. How should we act in such cases? Naturally, we protect in the first place, the interests of Soviet citizens who are remaining in the country. It is not easy to find the right criterion of objectivity and justice in settling such complicated and delicate questions . . .”56
In an attempt to ensure family unity, applicants for emigration visas were compelled, wherever possible, to get parental permission. But matters did not always work out to everyone’s benefit. In the early rush for visas after 1969 OVIR officials bent the rules and showed the recipients of vyzovs how to explain the relationship between themselves and the Israeli names on their invitations.57 Until 1978 the closeness of the kinship relationship was not important. Then OVIR officials were instructed to insist that the relationship should be close. Yet despite the various precautions husbands left wives and children, wives left husbands and parents and went with children alone. Many thousands of families were divided.
The Soviet Union responded to the Western pressures for the emigration of Soviet Jews in two ways. It counter-attacked with extensive and detailed criticisms of Zionism in the Soviet media and it permitted an increasing number of Soviet Jews to emigrate with Israeli visas. Anti-Zionist comments in the Soviet Union were, of course, not new but from 1970 they increased in intensity and quality. Many Soviet Jews criticized Zionism in such newspapers as Pravda, Izvestia, Trud and Republic papers such as Pravda Ukraine, Sovetskaya Moldavia and the Zarya Vostaka from Georgia. There was no uniformity in the reactions of either newspapers or writers. Some condemned Zionism and compared it with Nazism while others simply pointed out the benefits of living under socialism. Typical of the latter was the statement by an economist, Grigoriy Dzeventsky, on Tashkent television in March 1971. He said: “I am a Candidate of Economic Sciences; my sister is an engineer, a leading expert in one of the larger Moscow planning projects; her husband is a lieutenant colonel; my brother is an engineer and has an advanced degree in the technological sciences; his wife is a chemist; another brother is an electrician; his wife is an agronomist. My wife is a jurist. One cannot help asking what kind of defence our family is in need of?58
Anti-Semitism is a crime in the Soviet Union so there were no public anti-Semitic responses. The official reaction, as expressed in leading articles and editorials, was based in part on the contributions Jews had made to the development and defence of the Soviet Union and in part on a class analysis of Zionism as a form of nationalism which was no different from other nationalisms, including national socialism, in its performance as a doctrine of the bourgeoisie. A catalogue of Israeli acts from the Suez crisis in 1956 onwards showed it to practise militaristic imperialism, creating colonies out of Arab lands and carrying out racist policies with regards to Arabs. Israel was equated with South Africa.
The number of Jewish emigrants increased dramatically during the 1970s. From 1968 till 1982, 648,072 invitations to re-unite with families in Israel were received by Soviet Jews. Thus almost one- third of the total Jewish population received vyzovs and could, therefore, apply for exit visas. 381,700 of these, representing 58.9 per cent, did not use them for one reason or another. Altogether, 262,377 Jews left with visas for Israel in that period. At the beginning the movement was slow to take off even though the Jewish Agency sent out 27,301 vyzovs in 1969. It was not until 1971 when the full effects of the Zionist campaign within the Soviet Union were felt that emigration rose significantly. It remained at a high level until 1979 after which it tailed off to below the 1969 level. The signs were that the Zionist campaign had largely exhausted itself by the end of the decade. The following table shows the annual rate of emigration.
The Pattern of Emigration
The extent and pattern of Soviet Jewish emigration in the 1970s raised many questions, some of them contradictory. Why, in the first instance would so many Jews want to leave the Soviet Union? Why, on the other hand, did many Jews refuse to apply for visas after having received family invitations to go to Israel? Why were there changes in all of the indices in 1974, in particular in the refusal to settle in Israel. All of the people enumerated in the above table left the Soviet Union for Vienna with Israeli visas. Yet after 1974 the majority of them became what the Israelis called “drop-outs”; that is they changed their minds about their ultimate destination when they arrived at the Vienna reception centre. Why should Israel which started the agitation over Soviet Jewry become so unpopular with them? Each of these questions is reflected in the statistics. The answers clarify the whole issue of Soviet Jewry.
TABLE II
JEWISH EMIGRATION FROM THE USSR 1968-198459
| YEAR | NO. OF EMIGRANTS | % WHO REFUSED TO GO TO ISRAEL | NO. OF VYZOVS | % OF VYZOVS ACTUALLY USED |
| (i) | (ii) | (iii) | (iv) | (v) |
| 1968 | 229 | 0 | 6,786 | 3.4 |
| 1969 | 2,979 | 0 | 27,301 | 10.9 |
| 1970 | 1,027 | 0 | 4,830 | 21.3 |
| 1971 | 13,022 | 0.5 | 40,794 | 31.9 |
| 1972 | 31,681 | 0.8 | 67,895 | 46.7 |
| 1973 | 34,733 | 4.2 | 58,216 | 59.7 |
| 1974 | 20,628 | 18.8 | 42,843 | 48.1 |
| 1975 | 13,221 | 37.3 | 34.145 | 38.7 |
| 1976 | 14,261 | 49.1 | 36,104 | 39.5 |
| 1977 | 16,736 | 50.7 | 43,052 | 38.9 |
| 1978 | 28,865 | 58.4 | 107,212 | 26.9 |
| 1979 | 51,333 | 66.3 | 128,891 | 39.8 |
| 1980 | 21,471 | 65.6 | 32,335 | 66.4 |
| 1981 | 9,449 | 80.6 | 10,922 | 86.5 |
| 1982 | 2,688 | — | 3,159 | 85.1 |
| 1983 | 1,314 | — | 1,530 | 85.9 |
| 1984 | 896 | — | 1,140 | 78.6 |
The desire to emigrate varied widely between the Republics. The greatest interest was shown by the non-Ashkenazi Jews, described as Georgian Jews, Bukharans and Mountain Jews, whose Jewishness was expressed through their religion. They had lived in the Soviet Union since its creation but had retained a distinct sense of being Jewish. For them the final voyage was to Israel. Between 1968 and 1980 almost 20 per cent more Jews than were registered as such in Georgia received vyzovs and almost 60 per cent of them actually emigrated. In Azerbaidzhán and Tadzhikistan where non-Ashkenazis also lived the interest in emigration was high though the picture there is complicated by the "fact that half of the Soviet Central Asian Jews were Ashkenazis who had migrated from the West during and after the Second World War. The victory in the Six Day War and the Israeli campaign which followed it had an immediate impact on the non-Ashkenazis. They made up a substantial part of the flow from 1971 to 1974. Emigrating to Israel for them was not a rejection of the Soviet Union but a fulfilment of a prophesy.
Most of the remaining emigrants came from areas at the periphery of the Soviet Union which became part of that country during the Second World War. The areas were Lithuania, Latvia and parts of the Ukraine, Moldavia and Byelorussia. Although they did not express their Jewishness with the intensity of the non-Ashkenazis they were the least assimilated, and the most restless among Soviet Jews. Their experience of socialism had been relatively brief and they lived among a gentile population which had not been educated out of all of its racial prejudices. By the early 1970s they had been long enough away from the pre-war ghettos to forget them but not long enough under socialism to realize its benefits. The Israeli campaign provided an escape route for them.
The areas least affected by the call to emigrate were the three Slav Republics which had been in the Soviet Union since the beginning, namely the Ukraine, Byelorussia and the Russian Federation. Most of the emigrants from the Ukraine and Byelorussia came from parts annexed from Poland during the war. There was virtually no interest shown in emigration by the Ashkenazis Jews in the heartland of the Soviet Union. This is shown by the fact that only 13.8 per cent of the Jewish population of the RSFSR received vyzovs between 1968 and 1980 while only 4.4 per cent actually emigrated. The distribution of vyzovs and the extent of emigration from the various republics is shown in Table III
It is clear that anti-Semitism as a generalised form of discrimination was not responsible for this emigration. In Georgia, with the highest rate of emigration, there were not even rumours of anti-Semitism. Jews in the periphery, some still with memories of ghettos and the holocaust may have identified some aspects of socialist planning as discriminatory. The illusory freedom of ghetto life had gone. They were living in a collectivist society where the practice of nationalism in whatever form was discouraged. But none of this caused them to rank anti-Semitism as a significant factor in causing emigration.62 The propaganda about Soviet anti-Semitism aroused Western Jews but not Soviet ones for they knew better. Moreover, if anti-Semitism was as prevalent as the Western media maintained, why then did the majority of those who received family invitations from Israel refuse to emigrate? Zionist writers have claimed that this was so because the Soviet government restricted emigration by imposing quotas for each Republic but there were no quotas. 95 per cent of all visa applicants in the 1970s were successful.
TABLE III
SOVIET JEWISH EMIGRATION BY REPUBLIC 1968-198060
| REPUBLIC | VYZOVS | EMIGRANTS | ||
| NO OF VYZOVS | % OF JEWISH POPULATION IN REPUBLIC | NUMBER | % OF JEWISH POPULATION IN REPUBLIC | |
| Georgia | 66,144 | 119.3^(61) | 32929 | 59.4 |
| Lithuania | 13,868 | 58.7 | 11615 | 49.2 |
| Latvia | 20,334 | 55.4 | 13153 | 35.8 |
| Moldavia | 50,926 | 51.9 | 27376 | 27.9 |
| Tadzhikistan | 7,760 | 53.1 | 2981 | 20.4 |
| Azerbaidzhán | 29,501 | 71.4 | 7244 | 17.5 |
| Uzbekistan | 46,773 | 45.5 | 16247 | 15.8 |
| Ukraine | 246,571 | 31.7 | 91656 | 11.8 |
| Byelorussia | 31,220 | 21.0 | 10469 | 7.1 |
| RSFSR | 111,821 | 13.8 | 35702 | 4.4 |
The unsuccessful ones were called 'refuseniks' and their plight was widely publicized in the West. Some had waited for 10 or more years for a visa and by 1985 it was claimed that more than 8,000 names had accumulated on the 'refusenik' list. The reasons for failing to obtain a visa were because the applicants were involved in secret work, or were engaged in a major branch of the military, or were under investigation, or had failed in some way to comply with the regulations. About 25 to 30 per cent of the 'refuseniks’ received visas each year but some could never qualify and bore a perpetual grudge against the Soviet authorities which was exploited by the Western advocates of free Soviet emigration.
There is a big step between receiving an invitation from Israel and taking the decision to emigrate. Some of the vyzovs were unsolicited. The Jewish agencies were keen to involve as many Soviet Jews as possible in the emigration process and took the initiative in sending out invitations. The women’s Zionist organization in the USA, Hadassa, for instance, systematically set about collecting the names and addresses of Soviet Jews. It was not difficult to find name-sakes in Israel to establish vague family relationships. Hadassa then sent vyzovs to a large number of unsuspecting Soviet Jews who had never thought of emigration and who presumably destroyed their invitations. The ones who had sought the invitations had to weigh the costs and advantages of emigration. The first flow of emigrants consisted mainly of Zionists. After that the reasons were mainly material. The advantages, therefore, had to be expressed in terms of ease of settlement, the provision of jobs, opportunities for material advancement. Even the Georgian Jews were discouraged by letters complaining of absorption difficulties. There was a growing reluctance by recent immigrants to accommodate new immigrants, a phenomenon common in American history. New immigrants engaged in mounting protests about their treatment. Israeli bureacuracy, it was alleged, was worse than that in the Soviet Union. There were house shortages, job shortages and a high rate of inflation. Then from 1973 there was the realization that Israel was a dangerous place in which to live. The euphoria following the Six Day War disappeared entirely after the fourth Arab-Israeli conflict, the Yom Kippur War, which began in October 1973. This war was expensive in lives and equipment and inconclusive in its results. Israel was shown to be vulnerable to attack. The deployment of new technology against tanks and aircraft made sure that the days of quick victories, as in the Six Day War, were over. Israel's future wars were going to be prolonged and total. It was not an attractive proposition for would-be Soviet emigrants.
The Yom Kippur War had a dramatic impact on the flow of emigrants to Israel. Its immediate effect was to divert the emigrants to the USA. All Soviet Jewish emigrants left with Israeli visas, travelled to Vienna where they entered a reception camp and became the responsibility of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. HIAS provided subsistence, arranged and financed transport and handed out wages so that the emigrants could ease themselves relatively painlessly into the new society. It was a highly organised and well-endowed operation involving few of the hardships which earlier emigrants to other societies had had to endure.
From 1973 there was a notable increase in the number of people who decided in Vienna that they would prefer to travel on to the USA. HIAS, with finance from New York Jewry, was able to meet the cost of this change of plans. The US government facilitated it by granting refugee status to all Soviet Jewish emigrants. In American eyes the emigrants were emigrés. The annual rate of “drop-outs” is illustrated clearly in the following table:
TABLE IV
DESTINATION OF SOVIET JEWISH EMIGRANTS BY PERIOD63
| PERIOD | ISRAEL | ELSEWHERE | % GOING ELSEWHERE |
| 1968-1973 | 82,211 | 1,765 | 2.1 |
| 1974-1975 | 25,347 | 8,807 | 25.8 |
| 1976-1979 | 45,433 | 66,410 | 59.4 |
| 1980-1984 | 10,861 | 25,208 | 69.9 |
| 1968-1984 | 163,852 | 102,190 | 38.4 |
The emigrants, on arriving in Vienna, gave a number of reasons for changing their minds. It was, they said, the climate, a fear of war, apprehension about Israeli's future, general absorption difficulties and, in the later, part of the decade, a desire to reunite with families in the USA, though it was noted that “the 'drop-outs' often attempt to 'send' their old and ailing parents to Israel, while they themselves aim for the USA, Canada, Australia or Germany.”64 The Jews who emigrated after 1974 were increasingly the highly qualified residents of the main Soviet cities, who were simply seeking to acquire the life-styles of Western intellectual society. From 63 per cent to 85 per cent of all the emigrants from Kharkov, Odessa, Kiev, Leningrad, Minsk and Moscow between 1968 and 1980 were 'drop-outs'. The essential character of the process was revealed by one of the emigrants in 1978, a 37 year old head of a scientific laboratory in Novosibirsk in Western Siberia. He went abroad to read a paper at a conference. When he returned he asked at his laboratory “When can I go abroad again?” and was told "In four or five years”. He said “Suddenly I understood profoundly what Pavlov meant when he spoke of their ‘reflex of freedom’: that craving for unrestrained movement without which humans in particular become bored and depressed. I was bored by the passport system, the impossibility of changing one’s place of residence or travelling abroad, by the Soviet way of life in general Anti- Semitism was not a factor in my decision to emigrate.”65
From the Soviet point of view, the ‘drop-outs’ changed the character of the emigration process from one to facilitate repatriation and re-unite families to straight-forward emigration. Some Zionists felt that this threatened the possibility of Soviet Jews emigrating to Israel in the future and put pressure on the HIAS to stop financing ‘drop-outs’. The Soviet government, however, took no action to stop the flow. Emigration dried up at its source as the figures given above show. In Lithuania, for instance, there was not one application for an exit visa in 1985.66 In fact by then the process was beginning to reverse. It was reported from the USA that there was a “continuous upswing in the numbers of Soviet Jews leaving Israel.”67 This was part of a general movement from Israel. In 1981-82, 33,000 people entered Israel while 45,000 left it. The latest development is for Jews to return to the Soviet Union, dissatisfied with all Western options. This movement back is difficult. First, those who have received financial assistance from Jewish emigration agencies on the way out have to repay it before they are allowed to leave for the Soviet Union. Many emigrants have been unable to do this. Secondly there is no organization to facilitate the return. There is no resettlement camp in Vienna to arrange for finance and documents so the returnees live and work as best they can in a neighbourhood of Vienna. There is delay at the Soviet end for the Jews who wish to return home have to re-apply for Soviet citizenship which they renounced when they left. Nonetheless Jews are returning in small but increasing numbers.
The Dialectics of the Jewish Question
The Soviet Jewish question is both complex and contradictory. The issue as formulated in the West is that Soviet Jews, by being refused the right to leave the Soviet Union, are being prevented from escaping from unacceptable, discriminatory treatment. They arc. therefore, denied an inalienable right to leave and reenter their country freely. This is an infringement of a basic human right, founded on ‘natural law'. The ‘right to leave' is put next in priority to the 'right to life' itself, and at the heart of all other civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights. The Western advocates of the 'right to leave' refer to the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, endorsed in the autumn of 1948, which stated "Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country”. The issue was elaborated and endorsed by a United Nations Report in 1963 called "The Study of Discrimination in Respect of the Right of Everyone to Leave Any Country, Including His Own and to Return to His Country.” This Report regarded the ‘right to leave’ as a constituent element of personal liberty. Further United Nations’ declarations were made in 1965 and 1966 concerning the right of a person to leave any country. By 1970 it was clearly enshrined in international law.
The ‘right to leave’ as perceived by the United Nations was never absolute but subject to reasonable and necessary restrictions to protect national security, public order, public health or morals, or the rights and freedoms of others. In capitalist societies these considerations are generally theoretically subordinate to the freedom of an individual to choose. Indeed under capitalism the major moral issue is the freedom of choice. The ‘right to leave’ is a facet of this. The United Nations Declarations, by giving preeminence to the ‘right to leave’, were simply, therefore, reiterating individualism as the core value.
In socialist societies where collective considerations are paramount, individual rights are derived ones, conditional upon the protection of community interests. A United Nations of Socialist Societies would alter the format of a Declaration of Human Rights by reversing the emphasis on individual and collective rights. There would be no natural right to leave, only the facility to emigrate on compassionate grounds such as repatriation and re-uniting families. That has been the practice of the Soviet Union.
Enunciating the ‘right to leave’ as a principle at this period of history is not fortuitous but to support the practice of international capitalism. It has been done in defiance of the individual interests of many Soviet Jews who have been used as pawns in the Cold War struggle to preserve the hegemony of capitalism. The linch-pin in this particular struggle is the existence of the Zionist state, Israel, perpetually and virtually totally indebted to US financial interests. There is now a homeland to which Jews can be directed and which is eager to accept them. If there were no homeland there would be no Jewish question, except for committed Zionists seeking a homeland. There was no Jewish question on the agendas of governments before 1945 when ghettos and the holocaust dominated Jewish lives in Europe, when anti-Semitism was real and bitter. Even after Israel had been formed there was not really a Jewish question until it felt sufficiently strong and confident to project its Zionist philosophy. The existence of Israel was a necessary condition for the Soviet Jewish question but Zionism was the catalyst.
The Soviet treatment of Jews was not a causal factor in the emigration process. In the period between 1948 and 1953 when there was some discrimination against Jewish intellectuals there was condemnation from the West but no Soviet Jewish question. The question appeared when Soviet Jews had recovered from those setbacks and were benefiting from the post-war reconstruction in the country as a whole. As figures shown earlier in this chapter indicate, Jews were a relatively privileged group at the end of the 1960s. The issue of anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union arose as a major issue in the West to meet the needs of an aggressive Israeli nationalism after 1967. Indeed anti-Semitism is a corollary of Israeli nationalism. Nation-creating tendencies amongst a scattered people require a perception of the world outside as inferior, hostile and unsatisfactory. Once the Zionist flag began to be waved by Israel there were bound to be accusations of discrimination against Jews outside otherwise the waving was without meaning.
It was equally inevitable that the accusations should be directed at the Soviet Union. There were approximately 2 million Jews there without the freedom to emigrate and subject to powerful assimilating tendencies which were the antithesis of Zionism. There could never be any compatibility between socialism which unites on a class basis and a nationalism which is based on religion. This, of course, was one reason for Israel's preoccupation with Soviet Jewry. Israel’s case was taken up by the Western world, however for a different reason. It was a case which could be used to defame the Soviet Union. The Soviet Jewish question was quickly recognized as an instrument of anti- Sovietism. It turned out to be highly effective.
Once the issue became a part of Cold War politics then Soviet Jews lost their identities as people and became political pawns. They could be moved at the whim of the player. Their own personal interests disappeared from sight. Many Soviet Jews were unwittingly sucked into the emigration process by the sheer weight of propaganda and Jewish social pressure. For many of them this created personal tragedies. Although emigration allowed relatively wide kinship groups to unite it frequently shattered nuclear families. The images which many had of life in the West were illusory. Absorptive problems were difficult. From being highly qualified intellectuals in the Soviet Union they became unskilled lower middle class workers in the USA. Ninety per cent of Soviet emigrant doctors failed to obtain American qualifications to practice.68 In comparison with urban Soviet life, Israeli society was closed and uncultured whereas America was dominated by small-town materialism. The new immigrants quickly acquired cars but lost much which gave life substance. The letters to Soviet kin from emigrants revealed much unhappiness. To that has to be added the unhappiness of deserted wives, children and husbands. None of this mattered to the purveyors of anti-Sovietism.
Unfortunately, the Western Jews who campaigned so vigorously, and often in all innocence, also treated Soviet Jews as pawns. For the ordinary participants it was the campaign which mattered whereas for the organizers in the higher echelons of World Jewry the primary issue was the survival of Israel. It was logical that organized Jewry should support the Israeli campaign. They did so by financing the emigration process, by organizing agitations against the Soviet Union and by raising the issue constantly as a major human rights violation. They nurtured Israel so carefully that any criticism against it was construed an anti-Semitic When the Soviet Union was criticized for its human rights record, nothing was said about the Israeli treatment of Palestinian Arabs or about the methods of control used in the 'administered' territories. Yet Israel’s own human rights record was infamous. It expropriated Arab land, destroyed Arab homes and property, denied them rights of citizenship and used arrests, interrogations and imprisonment as common methods of control. The Defence Committee for Palestinian Detainees claimed in the early 1980s that 500 people were arrested every month, of whom 85 per cent were released soon afterwards.69 Demonstrations by Arabs were suppressed. “A report of the International Federation of Human Rights, drawn up after a mission carried out between 26 August and 7 September 1982 in the Occupied Territories mentions that "in a recent period 31 persons were killed by bullets, and 586 were wounded, 251 of them by bullets in the course of demonstrations on the public streets.”70 The Israelis used expulsion from the country as a punishment for Palestinian Arabs. More than 30 Arabs were expelled in an 18 months period after June 1985.71 The catalogue of human rights violations by Israel in the Lebanon is long and detailed. Constraints on the 'right to leave' seem minor and insignificant by comparison, yet the comparison is never made by Western Jewish critics of the Soviet Union.
The Western campaign for the emigration of Soviet Jewry has regenerated anti-Semitism. The failure to differentiate between Jewishness on the one hand and Zionism and Israel on the other has got the lines crossed. Whenever criticisms of Israeli foreign policy are described as anti-Semitic then non-Jews tend to identify Israeli behaviour with Jewishness rather than to see it as a consequence of bourgeois nationalism. The description of Soviet criticisms of Zionism as anti-Semitic have a similar consequence. Thus Jewishness is highlighted as a variable in situations where it plays no part. Similarly, the nation-building propaganda of Israel focusses attention on all Jews as potential adherents of Zionism so that the critics of Zionism become suspicious of the loyalties of Jews. This attracts attention to Jews not because of what they do or say but because of their nationality and this is basically racist. It is inevitable that questions will be asked of Jews in the Soviet Union after the massive campaign to persuade all Jews that their allegiance lies with Israel. Where do their loyalties lie? To what extent can trust be put in them? These questions raise no problems in capitalist societies for Zionism is consistent with capitalist philosophy. But to proclaim it in a socialist society is to challenge socialist legitimacy. For this reason Zionists have sometimes been punished for engaging in anti-state activities. In this way the Jewish question became linked to the entirely separate issue of dissent in the Soviet Union which was discussed in the previous chapter.
FOOTNOTES
- Soviet-Jewish Emigration and Soviet Nationality Policy by Victor Zaslavsky and Robert J Brym, London, 1983, p. 9.
- ibid, pp. 9-10.
- Quoted from The Jews and other National Minorities under the Soviets by Avrahm Yarmolinsky, New York, 1928, p. 48.
- Zaslavsky and Brym, op cit, pp. 11-12.
- ibid.
- Soviet Communism: A New Civilization? by S & B Webb, London, 1935, p. 152.
- ibid, p 153.
- Zaslavsky and Brym, op cit, p. 17.
- Soviet but not Russian by William Mandel, California, 1985, p. 320.
- The Destruction of the European Jews by Raul Hilberg, Chicago, 1961, p. 187. Heydrich was assassinated in Prague in 1942 and the inhabitants of Lidice were massacred as a reprisal.
- ibid, p. 192.
- Jewish Responses to Nazi Persecution by Isaiah Trunk, a compilation of memoirs by survivors, New York, 1979, p. 40.
- ibid.
- ibid.
- Hilberg, op cit, p. 197.
- See The Abandonment of the Jews. America and the Holocaust, 1941-1945 by David S Wyman, New York, 1984, pp. 19-30.
- Quoted in The Holocaust Denial by Gill Seidel, 1986, p. xiv.
- ibid, p. XV.
- Wyman, op cit, p. 6.
- Seidel, op cit, p. xv.
- Wyman, op cit, p 8.
- Britain and the Jews of Europe 1939-45 by Bernard Wasserstein, Oxford, 1979.
- Seidel, op cit, p. xvi.
- Wasserstein, op cit, p. 346. It was estimated that 3000 had been admitted between 1933 and 1939 (ibid p. 28).
- ibid, p. 19.
- ibid, p. 20.
- ibid.
- Auschwitz and the Allies by Martin Gilbert, London, 1981.
- Wyman, op cit, pp. 8-9.
- ibid, pp. x-xi.
- ibid, p. 136.
- Quoted from Cabinet Minutes, 16 May, 1945, by Wasserstein, op cit, p. 131.
- Quoted in Soviet Jewish Affairs Vol 15, No 1, p. 18.
- Quoted in Soviet But Not Russian by William Mandel, p. 326.
- Quoted in Soviet Jewish Affairs, Vol 15, No 1, p. 19.
- See “Jews in the 1979 Soviet Census: Initial Data” by Mordechai Altshuler, Soviet Jewish Affairs, Vol 10, No 3, 1980, pp. 6-7.
- Source: “The Jews in the 1979 Soviet Census: Initial Data” by Mordechai Altshuler, Soviet Jewish Affairs, Vol 10, No 3, 1980, p. 9. Data for 3 of the Republics, covering 2 per cent of the country’s Jews was not published.
- Quoted from Zaslavsky and Brym, op cit, p. 13.
- Soviet-Jewish Emigration and Soviet Nationality Policy, op cit, pp. 25-26.
- ibid, p. 15.
- “The Silent Majority” by T Friedgut, Soviet Jewish Affairs, Vol 10, No 2, May 1980, p. 6.
- Zaslavsky and Brym, op cit, p. 12.
- ibid, pp. 13-14.
- ibid, p. 13.
- See “A Periodization of Soviet Policy Towards the Jews” by William Orbach, Soviet Jewish Affairs, Vol 12, No 3, p. 58.
- "The Silent Majority” by T Friedgut, Soviet Jewish Affairs, Vol 10, No 2, pp. 14-15..
- “A Note on Jewish Membership of the Soviet Communist Party” by Everett M Jacobs, Soviet Jewish Affairs, Vol 6. No 2, 1976. pp. 114-115.
- “Jews and Emigration” by Igor Birman, Soviet Jewish Affairs, Vol 9, No 2, 1979, p. 49.
- My Russia, p. 165.
- Soviet but not Russian, op cit, p. 307.
- “Jewish Emigration” by Z Nezer, Soviet Jewish Affairs, Vol 12, No 3, Nov 1982, p. 5.
- Quoted in “Soviet Jews and Israeli Citizenship: The Nationality Amendment Law of 1971” by Leonard Schroeter, Soviet Jewish Affairs, No 2, November 1971.
- Zaslavsky and Brym, op cit, p. 43.
- This was how Jonathan Frankel say the situation from a Zionist perspective in “The Anti-Zionist Press Campaigns". Soviet Jewish Affairs, No 3, 1972.
- Quoted by Zaslavsky and Brym, op cit, p. 38.
- Quoted by G Ginsburg in “New Soviet Laws on Emigration”, Soviet Jewish Affairs, Vol 6, No 2, 1976, p. 9.
- Zaslavsky and Brym, op cit, p. 134.
- Soviet Jewish Affairs, No 3, May 1972, p. 15.
- Compiled from sources in Soviet Jewish Affairs, Vol 11, No 2, p. 16 and Vol 15, No 2, p. 42.
- Soviet Jewish Affairs, May, 1981, pp. 11-12.
- This figure is over 100 per cent because 19.3 per cent more than the registered number of Jews in Georgia received vyzovs.
- In a survey of emigrants only 5.3-6.0 per cent said they had suffered directly from discrimination. See “Emigration and Identity” by B Pinkus, Soviet Jewish Affairs, November, 1985, p. 13.
- Soviet Jewish Affairs, November, 1985, p. 20.
- ibid, May 1981, pp. 16-17.
- Zaslavsky and Brym, op cit, p. 56.
- Soviet Weekly, 14 December, 1985, p. 10.
- Soviet Jewish Affairs, November, 1985, p. 24.
- ibid, p. 27n.
- Israel and Palestine. Human Rights in Israel and in the Occupied Territories, END Papers, 9 Winter, 1984-5, p. 20.
- ibid, p. 27.
- The Guardian, 13 November, 1986.