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xtruss · 3 years

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Interview | 'He Was Red Army-Trained and Had Full US Security Clearance’ How A Jewish Manhattan Project Scientist Quietly Helped The Soviets Get The Bomb

New book ‘Sleeper Agent’ follows George Koval, a little-known US-born Russian spy posthumously honored by Putin – and possibly one of the 20th century’s most influential operatives

— By Rich Tenorio | October 2, 2021

'Sleeper Agent,' by Ann Hagadorn; George Koval as a professor at the Mendeleev Institute in Moscow in the 1950s. (Courtesy)

In 1948, FBI head J. Edgar Hoover was sharply focused on the Communist Party of the USA to root out Russian espionage — and with his attention concentrated there, missed the escape of a highly accomplished Soviet spy hiding in plain sight.

Born into a Jewish family that had immigrated from czarist Russia to the United States, George Koval habitually joined groups and clubs — a bowling league, bridge-playing circles, an honorary fraternity of electrical engineers. He also joined the US Army and conducted top-secret work at two locations of the Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bombs that exploded over Japan in 1945.

In 1949, the year after Koval’s return to the USSR, the Soviets successfully and shockingly detonated their own atomic bomb.

Now, Koval’s life is the subject of a new book, “Sleeper Agent: The Atomic Spy in America Who Got Away,” by former Wall Street Journal reporter Ann Hagedorn.

“I just think there’s a lot to be learned by George Koval’s story,” Hagedorn told The Times of Israel in a phone interview.

“It transcends a typical spy story. Yes, this is a spy story — there are code names in it. It’s thrilling. There’s a handler — a fascinating handler — and surveillance. But it transcends that. It’s really about the psychology of a spy and also about what motivated him. It’s about the backlash of bigotry… He knew the tremendous cost of oppression.”

The Koval family passport photo, 1932. (Left to right) Abram, Ethel, George, Gabrial, Isaiah. This was the year that the Kovals emigrated to the USSR’s new Jewish Autonomous Region. (Courtesy)

An Un-American Tale

Koval’s parents were part of a relatively obscure migration of Jews escaping antisemitism in Eastern Europe for the US in the early 20th century — the Galveston Project, named after the Texas port that became a southern alternative to Ellis Island.

After spending his first years in what was then a thriving Jewish community in Sioux City, Iowa, Koval and his family left an increasingly antisemitic America in another arguably obscure Jewish migration as the Soviets formed the Jewish Autonomous Region in the Russian Far East.

Koval’s father Abram Koval was a regional representative for the Association for the Colonization of Jews in Russia, or IKOR — a group that helped coordinate Jewish migration to the Autonomous Region and its administrative center in the town of Birobidzhan.

The Birobidzhan train station. (Rossella Tercatin/ Times of Israel)

“These were new parts of history for me, the Galveston Movement and also IKOR and the Jewish Autonomous Region,” Hagedorn said. “It’s a fascinating part of Jewish history, I think.”

George Koval eventually went to Moscow, where he graduated from the prestigious Mendeleev Institute and showed a knack for science. Despite the increasing paranoia of Joseph Stalin, Koval remained a believer in communist ideals, but feared for the safety of his family, including his Russian wife, Lyudmila. The two factors of communist idealism and pragmatic protection of his family, Hagedorn says, motivated him to become a spy.

George Koval and wife, Lyudmila Ivanova, circa 1936. (Courtesy)

Returning to the US, Koval enrolled at Columbia University, which at that time was becoming a nexus for some of the top academics who would work on the Manhattan Project. Drafted into the US Army, he took advantage of a government program that recruited individuals with scientific and technical knowledge for the top-secret, multi-location attempt to invent an atomic bomb. Soon, Koval was driving a Jeep and working at top-secret locations in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Dayton, Ohio, penning papers about safety techniques while keeping his eyes open about nuclear fission and the use of radium and polonium to make the bomb.

“We’re talking about a period of time when George Koval was in the US as a Red Army military-trained spy with full US security clearance,” Hagedorn said.

According to Hagedorn, there were multiple reasons for Koval’s going undetected. There was a need for his scientific expertise, she said, and the Soviet Union was then a US ally. Koval’s background growing up in the Midwest also helped him blend in.

A Spy You Probably Never Heard Of’

Koval came to Hagedorn’s attention in 2016, when she was working on a separate project about World War I and interviewing a 92-year-old man whose father was connected to the story. It turned out that she and her subject had both grown up in Dayton, and at the end of the interview, he mentioned that Dayton had been a Manhattan Project site.

“He said there was a Soviet spy living there during World War II you probably never heard of,” Hagedorn recalled. “I said, ‘Interesting. What was his name?’ He didn’t know the name or anything else at all, [so] I took a week off to see if I could find this guy’s name.”

She found his name and more in a 10-year-old New York Times article following Koval’s death in 2006.

“[It was] a very excellent story about a spy they believed was one of the most important spies of the 20th century, noting that Vladimir Putin had just given [him] a posthumous award,” she said. “It gave his name: George Koval.”

Ann Hagedorn, author of ‘Sleeper Agent: The Atomic Spy in America Who Got Away.’ (Pat Williamsen). She forgot to mention that United States stole this technology from Germans and become atomic power. In this BATHROOM everyone is NAKED and no one like to admit. You better ask to German Scientists who were captured and brought to the United States after WWII.

Hagedorn embarked on an ambitious project to learn more about Koval through research at places like the National Archives and the Center for Jewish History, examining sources from newspaper clippings to school yearbooks, tax records and ship manifests, as well as thousands of pages of FBI reports, some of them gained after filing Freedom of Information Act requests.

She found a later-in-life correspondence between Koval and a former colleague in the US, in which the former expressed no regrets for his espionage. Another document testified to his prowess as a spy.

When Koval returned to the USSR, he found an increasingly antisemitic climate, in which his American birth and Jewish identity might count against him. After Joseph Stalin’s death, some of the antisemitism abated and Koval pleaded for help from his past employer — the GRU, predecessor to the KGB — and its notorious head, Lavrentiy Beria. A letter soon found its way to his alma mater in Moscow, the Mendeleev Institute, instructing them to help him.

“The fact that Beria, and the fact that the GRU, answered his letter in 1953 after Stalin died is the living proof of their respect for him,” Hagedorn explained.

After all, she noted, “he blended in. He was all-American.”

An Accent Like Apple Pie

Born in Iowa, Koval spoke without a foreign accent and loved the American national pastime of baseball. Had any of his future employers at the Army or the Manhattan Project done any digging, they might have found evidence of early communist leanings as a teenager — participation in a communist youth gathering in Chicago, and an arrest while standing up for people impoverished by the Great Depression.

By the 1930s, the US was growing more antisemitic, as reflected by the Red Scare and the increasing presence of the Ku Klux Klan, including in Sioux City. The Koval family, which now numbered five — George, his two brothers and their parents — joined the Jewish community of Birobidzhan and found that life there was far from paradise. Yet the family stayed there, except for George, who wound up in Moscow.

After training as a scientist, Koval agreed to become a spy for the GRU.

George Koval at City College New York with fellow soldiers in the US Army Specialized Training Program, 1944. Koval is in the middle row, first on the right. Koval’s friend Arnold Kramish is in the top row, third from right. (Courtesy)

“He was dedicated to science and dedicated to the communist ideal,” Hagedorn said. “To me, his top priority, I think, was loyalty to his family. Joining the Red Army military, becoming a Red Army military intelligence officer in 1939, he would be protecting his family… If he had been killed [in action], his family would have been taken care of.”

In the US, Koval took care of his family by staying under the radar for eight years. He lived in a Yiddish-friendly housing complex called the Sholem Aleichem Houses and remained incommunicado with other Soviet spies of the era except his handler — a fellow Jew named Benjamin Lassen (originally Lassow), a Bronx-based agent who operated out of his Manhattan business-office front.

When the US Army drafted Koval in 1943, it missed the fact that he was a graduate of the Mendeleev Institute, but noted that he had taken a course in chemistry at Columbia — exactly what the military needed for an elite group called the Army Specialized Training Program.

The Sholem Aleichem Houses in the Bronx, home to George Koval from 1941 to 1943. This housing community was founded in the 1920s to help preserve Yiddish culture. (Courtesy)

“It was a highly scientific group of gentlemen sent to different sites of the Manhattan Project working with scientists,” Hagedorn said. “Their specific scientific training helped the military.”

Koval worked as a health physicist — “a very new field,” Hagedorn said. “These were gentlemen studying safety procedures to protect workers from radiation contamination. They did all kinds of studies of radiation, creating instruments, measuring dust particles in the air.”

And, she said, health physicists like Koval had access to “all facilities” of the Manhattan Project: “It’s certainly what helped him as a Soviet spy.”

The project soon realized its goals. On August 6, 1945, the US detonated an atomic bomb over Hiroshima, Japan. Three days later, on August 9, it detonated another bomb over Nagasaki, leading to the end of WWII.

‘Sleeper Agent: The Atomic Spy in America Who Got Away,’ by Ann Hagedorn. (Courtesy: Simon and Schuster)

Within a year, Koval was growing nervous about anticommunist sentiment in the US, and began requesting that the USSR send him home. He also turned down a job offer from the US Army.

“I think his handler and others wanted him to take the job,” Hagedorn said. “He knew the security would be huge,” and that it would be very possible for the US government to dig up things from his past, such as the 1930 Communist Youth League conference he attended or his arrest a year later.

“He was smart,” Hagedorn said. “He knew all these possibilities could be discovered and he left in 1948 as soon as he could.”

It has been 15 years since Koval’s death, yet he remains enigmatic — including to the author.

“I would have loved to have interviewed him,” Hagedorn said. “What would be the first question I would ask him? ‘OK, why did you do it?’”

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stuffedeggplants · 4 years

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Book tag game! List the books you’ve read in the past year, your favorites, least favorites, most disappointing, etc.

As usual, anyone is welcome to do this. I don’t want to tag anyone in case they’d rather be left alone for personal reasons.

Favorites:

Batavia’s Graveyard by Mike Dash focuses on a mutiny aboard a 17th century Dutch East India Company ship which wrecks off the coast of Australia. The instigator was an incredibly sadistic, cruel, and manipulative person who carries out/personally orders a lot of terrible things. The author weaves in translated journals/reports from survivors, court testimony, and goes into a lot of interesting background on various aspects of Dutch society at the time so that you can better understand the context all these people live and move in.

A Ride to Khiva was written in 1876 by Frederick Burnaby, a captain in the British army. It recounts his attempt the prior year to travel from St. Petersburg to illegally enter the Khanate of Khiva (roughly part of modern Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan) as part of the conflict between the British Empire and Russian Empire in Central Asia. I minored in history and have always been interested in it, so I love reading historical memoirs and first-hand accounts of people from the past and just seeing how they understand the world around them. The author of this book has a lot to say about the political issues of the day and makes a lot of cultural observations, both of which are very interesting to read from a modern day perspective. (I think early on in the trip, he’s sitting on a train next to an Indian man who tells him that Indian independence is inevitable someday. I wanted to go back in time to triumphantly tell this guy that he was right, but felt a little sad at the same time because he likely didn’t live to see his people finally win that ~70 years later.)

A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge. This one didn’t initially grab me, but once I passed a certain point I was hooked and couldn’t put the book down. The background and story itself was plenty interesting, but the themes, ideas, conflicts, and the way characters were humanized were are all great.

Most Disappointing:

Dichronauts by Greg Egan. The concept was interesting, but the book’s primary purpose was clearly to explore what things are like on a hyperbola-shaped world with altered laws of physics. (The author actually has a whole website explaining the math behind the idea.) Egan clearly had plenty of ideas that could’ve been developed into a compelling story, but he never goes far enough with them. The book wasn’t bad, it was just disappointing because I was expecting more of something else while the author himself was obviously more interested in exploring mechanical/physics problems.

Semiosis by Sue Burke starts off really interesting, but then something happens part-way through the book which I felt led to a series of cop-outs that made me uninterested in reading the sequels and killed what was so intriguing about the book itself. The premise is that Earth colonists arrive on an “uninhabited” planet where it turns out that plants are the dominant form of life and sentient, and for that I’d say it’s worth checking out. I don’t regret reading it, but this is in the ‘disappointing’ category for a reason.

Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms: Journeys Into the Disappearing Religions of the Middle East by Gerard Russell is only in this category because I was unable to prevent myself from wanting a comprehensive, more academic perspective coming from someone with a history and/or religious studies background. The author is very clear right from the outset that he’s a British diplomat who speaks Farsi and Dari, and the book is the result of years of his own travels and investigations and speaking with people from the communities he profiles. It’s quite interesting and valuable but by the end of the book I felt a little let down that he wasn’t somebody who could give me the perspective I wanted. By the end I’d had several moments where I questioned why he failed to notice or bring up certain things (like more historical context or tie-ins with related cultures and religions, whatever) that I noticed because of my own experience and background, but that’s entirely on me because the author was, like I said, very clear about his own background so I shouldn’t have expected anything else.

The books I read are below the cut.

Shipwreck genre [non-fiction]

Island of the Lost – Joan Druett

Skeletons on the Zahara – Dean King

Batavia’s Graveyard – Mike Dash

Science Fiction and Fantasy

All Systems Red – Martha Wells

Artificial Condition – Martha Wells

Dichronauts – Greg Egan

A Deepness in the Sky – Vernor Vinge

A Fire Upon the Deep – Vernor Vinge

The Children of the Sky – Vernor Vinge

Stories of Your Life and Others – Ted Chiang

Empire of Sand – Tasha Suri

Rosewater – Tade Thompson

Semiosis – Sue Burke

The Cloven – Brian Catling

Fiction

Numero Zero – Umberto Eco

History-related [non-fiction]

A Ride to Khiva – Frederick Burnaby

The Horse, the Wheel, and Language – David W. Anthony

Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms: Journeys Into the Disappearing Religions of the Middle East – Gerard Russell

Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past – David Reich

Ten Restaurants that Changed America – Paul Freedman

The Billion Dollar Spy – David E. Hoffman

12 Strong – Doug Stanton

Where the Jews Aren't: The Sad and Absurd Story of Birobidzhan, Russia's Jewish Autonomous Region – Masha Gessen

To Finish

One Part Woman – Perumal Murugan

This Kind of War: A Study in Unpreparedness – T.R. Fehrenbach

Hard Contact – Karen Traviss

Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water – Marc Reisner

#tag games #my stuff

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pargolettasworld · 5 years

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youtube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwbJ-8gRC38

Yosef Kerler was a poet, author, literary editor, and lyricist in Yiddish. He was born in Ukraine, lived in Birobidzhan for a while, and got in deep trouble with the Soviets for “anti-Soviet nationalistic activity,” which, in the early 50s, was pretty much Soviet for “being Jewish.” He was sent to a gulag in Siberia for about ten years, returned, continued being a provocateur, and eventually escaped the Soviet Union in 1971. He ended up in Israel, where he died in 2000. Eight years later, I had Yiddish class with his son in Vilna.

Kerler was what was once known as a “refusenik.” The refuseniks were largely Jewish, and they were people who were refused permission to emigrate from the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union didn’t really want Jews living there, but it also didn’t want its citizens just up and leaving. So, with the top-notch, A1 logic of dictatorships everywhere, it compromised by not letting the Jews leave while also making their lives as miserable as possible. The plight of the refuseniks was a Big Cause for Western Jewish communities in the 1970s and 1980s, as I dimly recall.

This song is one of Kerler’s refusenik anthems. It’s all about how the people of Israel will live -- am yisroel chai! -- and all of their enemies should suffer terrible fates. It’s a bit vicious, true, but you can see where Kerler was coming from!

#jewish music #yiddish

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comrade-jiang · 7 years

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hi sorry to bother you but i was wondering what are some reasons you hate stalin and the ussr so much? this might be a stupid question but im still new to socialism and my sources of information seem to be quite sympathetic to the way of the tank sometimes

Just getting around to this ask, sorry.

One of the most prime reasons is the Soviet-Nazi non-aggression pact, known formally as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. As the description implies, the MRP was a peace treaty signed between the Soviets and Nazis about a week before the invasion of Poland.

The Nazis commenced their invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939, and the Soviet Union theirs on 17 September of the same year (1 day before my birthday, but beside the point). The two nations divided up Poland, and despite having the manpower, Stalin and his officials maintained the secret pact and did not stand up to Germany until Hitler broke the pact with Operation Barabrossa on 22 June 1941.

Stalin himself used antisemitic buzzwords in his dissertations against Trotsky, who was Jewish, or at least of Jewish ancestry. The Soviet state-run press spoke of Jews as "groveling before the West," helping "American imperialism," "slavish imitation of bourgeois culture" and "bourgeois aestheticism."

There was also the suggested “Jewish Autonomous Oblast”, which would’ve sequestered the Jewish population of the Soviet union in the far east, bordering the bitterly-cold Heilongjiang province in China. From Wikipedia, Stalin and Antisemitism:

To offset the growing Jewish national and religious aspirations of Zionism and to successfully categorize Soviet Jews under Stalin's nationality policy an alternative to the Land of Israel was established with the help of Komzet and OZET in 1928. The Jewish Autonomous Oblast with the center in Birobidzhan in the Russian Far East was to become a "Soviet Zion". Yiddish, rather than "reactionary" Hebrew, would be the national language, and proletarian socialist literature and arts would replace Judaism as the quintessence of culture. Despite a massive domestic and international state propaganda campaign, the Jewish population there never reached 30% (as of 2003 it was only about 1.2%). The experiment ground to a halt in the mid-1930s, during Stalin's first campaign of purges, as local leaders were not spared during the purges.

I’m not Jewish, but their poor treatment in the Soviet Union is a major reason why I don’t stand behind it. The aesthetics might be nice, and we can respect legendary Nazi-killers like Vasiliy Zatzyev and Lyudmila Pavlichenko without looking up to statism or Stalinism.

The origins of the Soviet Union are even stranger. Lenin supported a system of state capitalism, which is what the Soviet Union started as, and what it remained as until its death in 1991. From Lenin, The Tax in Kind:

State capitalism would be a step forward as compared with the present state of affairs in our Soviet Republic. If in approximately six months’ time state capitalism became established in our Republic, this would be a great success and a sure guarantee that within a year socialism will have gained a permanently firm hold and will have become invincible in this country.

From Lenin, To the Russian Colony in North America:

The state capitalism, which is one of the principal aspects of the New Economic Policy, is, under Soviet power, a form of capitalism that is deliberately permitted and restricted by the working class. Our state capitalism differs essentially from the state capitalism in countries that have bourgeois governments in that the state with us is represented not by the bourgeoisie, but by the proletariat, who has succeeded in winning the full confidence of the peasantry.Unfortunately, the introduction of state capitalism with us is not proceeding as quickly as we would like it. For example, so far we have not had a single important concession, and without foreign capital to help develop our economy, the latter’s quick rehabilitation is inconceivable.

Additionally, the Soviets crushed anarchist movements in the Union. There was no room for error if you were in the Soviet Union- once the anarchists had served their purpose, they were often executed or “disappeared” to gulags.

The major example of this is the Kronstadt Rebellion. This originated when Soviet production plummeted and the anarchist sections of the Soviet Baltic Fleet deserted. They formed a new constitution of sorts in Petrograd:

Immediate new elections to the Soviets; the present Soviets no longer express the wishes of the workers and peasants. The new elections should be held by secret ballot, and should be preceded by free electoral propaganda for all workers and peasants before the elections.

Freedom of speech and of the press for workers and peasants, for the Anarchists, and for the Left Socialist parties.

The right of assembly, and freedom for trade union and peasant associations.

The organisation, at the latest on 10 March 1921, of a Conference of non-Party workers, soldiers and sailors of Petrograd, Kronstadt and the Petrograd District.

The liberation of all political prisoners of the Socialist parties, and of all imprisoned workers and peasants, soldiers and sailors belonging to working class and peasant organisations.

The election of a commission to look into the dossiers of all those detained in prisons and concentration camps.

The abolition of all political sections in the armed forces; no political party should have privileges for the propagation of its ideas, or receive State subsidies to this end. In place of the political section, various cultural groups should be set up, deriving resources from the State.

The immediate abolition of the militia detachments set up between towns and countryside.

The equalisation of rations for all workers, except those engaged in dangerous or unhealthy jobs.

The abolition of Party combat detachments in all military groups; the abolition of Party guards in factories and enterprises. If guards are required, they should be nominated, taking into account the views of the workers.

The granting to the peasants of freedom of action on their own soil, and of the right to own cattle, provided they look after them themselves and do not employ hired labour.

We request that all military units and officer trainee groups associate themselves with this resolution.

We demand that the Press give proper publicity to this resolution.

We demand the institution of mobile workers' control groups.

We demand that handicraft production be authorised, provided it does not utilise wage labour.[7]

The Soviets responded to this by labeling them as members of the Black Hundreds, who... didn’t actually exist anymore. They then forcibly retook the city from the socialists who had drafted a constitution and set out their goals in a fair manner, and executed upwards of 2000 people.

This is a long ask, and I can go into more detail if you need, but these transgressions are more than enough for most leftists to discard Soviet worship as a whole.

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ruglen-holon · 7 years

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if you really think you can disprove redmensch, refute each of the books and points he referenced with annotated sources, bc you aren't explaining your point of view with anything substantial

I guess this is as good of a time as any to post a huge excerpt on the Jews of the USSR from Human Rights in the Soviet Union:

***The Jewish People in the USSR***

During the Czarist period the Jewish people, largely confined by imperialist edict to the western part of the Russian Empire (i.e. 'the Pale) (Poland, the Baltic states, the Ukraine and Belorussia) suffered vicious anti-Semitism. Beginning in the last decades of the 19th Century, the Czarist government sponsored violent pogroms against the Jewish people during times of crisis, making them the scapegoat for economic and political problems, and thereby deflecting criticism from itself. Jews were systematically excluded from privileged positions, and many were driven out of the country by discrimination and pogroms in the generation before the 1917 Revolution, large numbers of whom settled in the USA.

Immediately after the Bolshevik Revolution expressions of anti-Semitism became a crime. In July 1918, the Council of People's Commissars called for the destruction of 'the anti-Semitic movement at its roots' by forbidding 'pogromists and persons inciting to pogroms'. In 1922, the Russian Criminal Code forbade 'agitation and propaganda arousing national enmities and dissensions' and specified a minimum sentence of one year's solitary confinement (and 'death in time of war') as punishment. In 1927, the Russian Republic passed legislation outlawing the dissemination, manufacture or possession of literature calculated to stir national and religious hostility.

Article 74 of the Russian Criminal Code, which came into effect in 1961, reads, 'Propaganda or agitation aimed at inciting racial or national enmity or discord ... is punishable by loss of personal freedom for a period of six months to three years, or exile from two to five years.'

During the Civil War and throughout the 1920s there was an active official government campaign against anti-Semitism, incidents involving, and actions taken against, were frequently reported in the Soviet press. In this period the Party published over 100 books and brochures opposing anti-Semitism.

Jewish intellectuals and workers were disproportionately active in the revolutionary movement in the Russian Empire. In 1922, Jews represented 5.2% of Communist Party membership (about five times their percentage of the population). From the late 1920s through to World War II the proportion of Jews in the Party was about 4.3%. 56 During the Civil War large numbers of non-Marxist Jews rallied to the Bolsheviks, the only major non anti-Semitic organized force.

The White Armies and their allies systematically promoted pogroms and other forms of anti-Semitism as part of their campaign to defeat the revolution. Many of the top Party leaders were Jews e.g. Kamenev, Trotsky and Zinoviev, Kaganovich and Litvinov.

After the Soviet regime had removed all the traditional Czarist restrictions on Jews, they eagerly took advantage of the new educational, economic and social activities opened to them. As a result both of the elimination of traditional barriers and the general leftist mobilisation in which most Jews participated, large numbers gave up their traditional ways, and became part of the mainstream of the newly emerging Soviet society.

The majority of the young generation of Jews became alienated from both the religion and the cultural practices of their parents. As a measure of the rapid integration of Jews into Soviet society, intermarriage, which was extremely rare before the Revolution, became quite common. In the 25 years after the revolution, traditional Jewish life was revolutionized as the Communist Party organized new organizations to impart a socialist content to Jewish culture.

Special 'Jewish national districts' for Jewish settlement were set aside in the south of Russia, the Ukraine and Crimea. 58 In 1928, an autonomous Jewish Republic was established within the Russian Republic of Birobidzhan, on the border of Manchuria. This was meant not only as a 'Jewish homeland', but as a means of encouraging development of an undeveloped area of the East. Birobidzhan was officially proclaimed an autonomous region in 1934, and although it has attracted relatively few Jewish settlers, it continues to exist as a Jewish Autonomous Republic.

Jewish culture, within a socialist rather than a religious or Zionist context, thrived in the 1920s and 1930s. Both the Ukrainian and Belorussian Academy of Sciences included Jewish sections which were described as 'a laboratory of scientific thought in the field of Jewish culture'. These institutions focused on the history of the revolutionary movement among Jews and the social and economic condition of their people. In 1919, a Jewish State Theatre was established in Moscow, and by 1934 a further 18 had been established in other cities. Jewish theatre, as well as other expressions of Jewish culture, was strongly supported by the Soviet state. In 1932, 653 Yiddish books were published with a total circulation of more than 2.5 million (an average run of about 4,000 copies). In 1935, there were Yiddish dailies in Moscow, Kharkov, Minsk and Birobidzhan; in the Ukraine alone ten Jewish dailies were in circulation. During the mass hysteria of theGreat Purge Trials (1936-38), essentially caused by the paranoid fear of Japanese and German invasion, many Yiddish cultural institutions, along with many other institutions in Soviet society, were temporarily closed down, to be largely revived during World War II.

During World War II a Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was set up in the Soviet Union, to help mobilize both Soviet and non-Soviet Jews against Fascism, and to encourage the development of a socialist oriented Jewish culture. Jews were given priority in evacuation from areas about to be overrun by the Nazi invaders. Virtually all Polish Jews who survived the holocaust (250,000) survived by fleeing to the Soviet Union and being evacuated East.

In the immediate post- World War II period, Yiddish culture thrived in the USSR. The Jewish State Theatre continued to prosper in Moscow; a tri-weekly paper, Aynikayt, was published, also in Moscow; between 1946 and 1948 110 books were published in Yiddish. The Soviet Union was the first country to accord diplomatic recognition to Israel.

In 1948, with the onset of the Cold War, the paranoid atmosphere characteristic of the late 1930s returned to the USSR. There were a number of official accusations that some politically prominent, professional Soviet Jews were involved in 'cosmopolitan', pro-Western or Zionist (anti-Socialist nationalist) plotting against the Soviet state.

The hysterical atmosphere of the 1948-53 period was induced by fear of another attack, this time by the US and its NATO allies.* There was a tendency to identify most manifestations of Jewish nationalism with 'cosmopolitanism", 'Zionism' and pro-imperialism during these years, in good part owing to the new state of Israel's increasing identification with the West. The Jewish Anti- Fascist Committee was dissolved; the Jewish State Theatre in Moscow was closed. Shlomo Mikhoels, a prominent actor and head of the Jewish Anti- Fascist Committee, was assassinated (by the KGB according to Zionists) and various Yiddish publishing houses and periodicals closed. Hundreds of prominent Jewish literary figures and political activists were arrested and charged with under-mining the Soviet state by working with Western bourgeois or Zionist forces. The height of the anti-Zionism campaign was manifested in an announcement in January 1953, that a group, mostly of Jewish doctors, were plotting to kill prominent Soviet leaders (apparently including Stalin). These doctors were accused of working on behalf of the Zionist 'international Jewish bourgeois national organisation' - the Joint Distribution Committee. In February 1953, a month after the announcement of the discovery of 'the doctor's plot' the Soviet Union broke off diplomatic relations with Israel, and shortly thereafter began to support the Arabs in their confrontation with the Zionist state. The Soviet reversal on the Arab-Israeli question was largely motivated by Israel's increasing integration with US imperialism.

After Stalin's death in March 1953, the campaign against 'the doctor's plot' was quietly dropped. But it had provoked suspicions against many Jews working in medical facilities on the grounds of their alleged Zionist sympathies (and thus anti-Soviet potential). Thousands of Jewish medical specialists were dismissed from laboratories, hospitals, medical institutes and faculties during this campaign.

Many anti-Soviets in the West, especially Zionists, have argued that the 1948-53 campaign against 'cosmopolitanism' and 'Zionism' was really a manifestation of anti-Semitism (analogous to that of Hitler's) but a realistic assessment demonstrates that this argument functioned to serve the interests of Western and Israeli Zionists in their long-term battle with Jewish Marxists for hegemony in the Jewish community, as well as to strengthen Western imperialist support for Israel. Nevertheless, in common with the far more vicious events of 1936-38 the hysteria and the purges of 1948-53 seem to have been the outcome of a considerable over-estimation of the danger from pro-Western Jewish and Zionist forces in the Soviet Union.

Many innocent Jews appeared to have suffered, although little permanent harm seems to have resulted either to individuals or to their careers. The Soviets were slow, however, in restoring the various Yiddish cultural institutions that were closed in the 1948-53 campaign, and, combined with the rapid undermining of Yiddish and Yiddish culture through urbanization, education and professionalization, this has meant that distinctive Jewish cultural life never regained the level of the pre- 1948 period.

***The Economic Position of Soviet Jews***

Professionally and economically the Jewish people have fared extremely well in the period of Soviet power. They are, for example, far more highly educated than any other nationality in the Soviet Union, and in 1970-71 the ratio of higher education students per 1,000 population was 49.2. This is almost twice as high as the next highest group, the Georgians, who had a ratio of 27.1 per 1,000. (Russians rank fourth on this indicator with a ratio of 21.1 per 1,000) In the Russian Republic in the early 1970s, of every 1,000 Jews of ten years old and above 344 completed some form of higher education, compared with only 43 out of 1 ,000 Russians; an 8 : 1 ratio in favour of the Jews. Comparable ratios in the Ukraine were 6.5 : 1. in Belorussia 7:1. and in Latvia 5.5 : I.

In the early 1970s approximately 1 10,000 Jewish students were in institutions of higher education; this represents 2.55% of the total — an over-representation factor of almost three. In 1960 77,000 Jewish students had been in such institutions.

In 1971, 6.7% of all scientific workers in the Soviet Union were Jews. In that year .9% of all Soviets were Jews, therefore, in this field Jews were over-represented by a factor of 7.5. Armenians, with an over-representation factor of 1 .5 in the same year came next, and Russians, with an over-representation factor of 1 .2 were fourth in this respect.

Around 1970 about 68% of all Jews employed in the Russian Republic were specialists with either a higher or secondary special education; this compares with 19% of Russians. In the mid-1960s, 15% of all Soviet doctors, 9% of all writers and journalists. 10% of all judges and lawyers and 8% of all actors, musicians and artists were Jewish. The percentage of Jews in the various professions has been declining, even though their absolute numbers have been rising. In 1972, there were 68.000 Jewish scientific workers, approximately double the number of those so employed in 1960; but in that year 9.5% of all scientific workers were Jews compared to 6.1% in 1973. Given the considerable advances of the traditionally backward nationalities, especially the Asians, this is to be expected.

***The Jewish Religion***

The practice of Judaism as a religion has received more or less the same treatment as has the practice of other religions, such as Russian Orthodoxy, Islam, Catholicism and Lutheranism. Official policy and practice is to permit religion to be practised, but to discourage its propagation by forbidding organized religious instruction, active conversion and other forms of religious propaganda, while at the same time officially propagating anti-religious and atheistic precepts ; The Party considers all religions to be superstitions which will gradually die out, as the oppressive conditions which gave birth to them are eliminated, and the old people brought up in the old religious environments die. When applied to Judaism, the offical anti-religious policies in operation for all religions are often singled out by the Western media or by Zionist interests in the West to substantiate the claim that the USSR discriminates against Judaism (in a manner analogous to Hitler), thereby attempting to mobilize world Jewish and public opinion against the Soviet Union.

Ninety-eight percent of Jews in the USSR live in urban areas, mostly concentrated in the larger cities. This fact, together with the remarkable educational and professional progress of Soviet Jews, manifests their central integration into Soviet society, with the corollary of rapid deterioration of traditional Jewish ways. Most Jews, especially the younger, have adopted the secular atheism of Soviet society, few any longer subscribe to Judaism. It is mostly the old, together with nationalist dissidents, who attend religious services or otherwise practise Judaic rites. 68 As a result the number of active synagogues have been declining.

In the early 1970s there were about 100 active synagogues in the Soviet Union, although the figure given for 1972 by anti-Soviet Jewish organizations in the West was 58. A small yeshivah operates in Moscow to train rabbis, and limited editions of prayer books are published: 3,000 in 1957, and another edition of 5,000 in 1968. Two Judaic religious rites have been subjected to pressure from the state: Passover and circumcision. Circumcision, which is also traditionally practised by the Islamic peoples, is regarded by the Soviets as a barbaric custom comparable to subincision or clitoridectomy. The Soviets have attempted to suppress this practice since the Revolution ; more stringently in the Asian republics than among the Jews.

The celebration of Passover is regarded as primarily a Zionist rather than a pious manifestation. Passover commemorates the deliverance of the Jewish people from Egyptian bondage and is marked by the recitation of the words 'Next Year in Jerusalem'. That Zionists both inside and outside the Soviet Union, many of whom are atheists, have, in fact, given the celebration of Passover a Zionist and anti- Soviet character (asserting that the modern day Egyptian captor is the Soviet state) has not gone unnoticed by the Soviets.

There have been Jewish complaints both inside and outside the USSR that the Soviet state often puts obstacles in the way of securing matzo (unleavened bread) which is used as part of the Passover celebration. Such mild harassment of what is officially considered to be anti-Soviet or reactionary aspects of a religion is by no means unique to the treatment of Judaism. For example, the traditional pilgrimage to Mecca, required of devout Islamic men, has been largely suppressed, as has the wearing of the veil for women.

Soviet anti-religious propaganda in general attacks all religions, and in particular, those aspects that are regarded as specifically harmful within each religion. An analysis of anti-religious propaganda directed at Jews in the 1960s finds such specific themes as: (1) The Jewish religion promotes allegiance to another state, Israel, and to a reactionary, pro-imperialist movement, Zionism; (2) the Jewish religion promotes the notion that the Jewish people are superior to others, 'the chosen people', and thus breeds hatred of other peoples; (3) the Jewish religion elevates the pursuit of material wealth, a pursuit incompatible with the Communist ideal of Soviet society; and (4) the Jewish religion calls for genocide and enslavement of other peoples by the Jews (a reference to the effect of Zionism on the Arabs).

***Jewish Culture***

Traditional Jewish languages, especially Yiddish, are dying out in the USSR. In 1970, only 17.7% of Jews reported that they spoke a Jewish language as their native tongue; a further 7.7% reported they were able to speak such a language, but that it was not their mother tongue. Those who continue to speak Yiddish, or one of the Oriental Jewish languages, are either old people or those largely concentrated in the peripheral regions that were incorporated into the USSR in 1939-41, or both. Very few younger Russian, Belorussian or Ukrainian Jews now speak or understand Yiddish. This contrasts sharply with the situation before the Revolution, when 97% of all Jews in Russia (including Russian Poland) regarded Yiddish as their mother tongue; by 1926, this figure stood at 70%. 72 In 1970, 60% of Jews in Lithuania specified Yiddish as their native tongue, 40% in Latvia and approximately 50% in Moldavia.

The rapid decline of Yiddish reflects the general decline of distinctively Jewish culture among a highly urbanized, educated and professionalized population that has become fully integrated into Soviet society. That the responsibility for this decline does not rest upon any Russification policies of the Soviet state is demonstrated by the situation of the various European and Asian minority nationalities that are geographically concentrated. In these areas, rapid economic progress has not undermined traditional languages and cultures. Nevertheless, it should be noted that there have been no Yiddish language schools in the USSR since 1948.

A small Yiddish cultural establishment still exists in the USSR, although on a much smaller scale than in the pre-1948 period. Yiddish papers, publishing houses and theatres were restored after 1956, following their suppression as part of the 1948-53 'anti-cosmopolitan', anti-Zionist campaign. In the mid-1970s there were two Yiddish periodicals circulated in the USSR: Sovetish Heimland, a literary monthly with a circulation of 25,000, and the thrice weekly newspaper the Birobidzhaner Shtern with a circulation of 12,000, largely outside the Jewish Autonomous Republic of Birobidzhan where it is published, Yiddish speakers also have access to Yiddish language publications and periodicals published by Jewish Marxists overseas.

A few books continue to be published in Yiddish. Between 1948 and 1 970, 32 Yiddish language books were published in the USSR. 76 More important than Yiddish language publications, which can be read by only about one of eight Soviet Jews, are works translated into Russian which originally were published in Yiddish. In recent years there have been a considerable number of these, many of which are issued in quite long press runs. For example, in 1973 50,000 copies of I. Rabin's On the Nieman. originally written in Yiddish, were printed in Russian. Many Russian translations from the Yiddish are of poetic works.

The most co nspicuous expression of Jewish culture in the USSR, and that receiving the widest participation, is the Jewish theatre. There are several Jewish song, music and drama companies, the oldest being the Vilnius Jewish People's Theatre, which was established in 1957. Since 1962, the Moscow Dramatic Ensemble, a Jewish theatrical group, many of whose actors were part of the old Jewish State Theatre, has been performing regularly in Moscow; there are also a number of other itinerant Jewish theatre groups, including the Birobidzhan Yiddish People's Theatre and the Kishinev Jewish

***Political Positions***

Jews have the highest representation in the Communist Party of any other Soviet nationality. In 1965, 80 out of every 1,000 Jews belonged to the Party, compared to the Soviet average of 51 per 1,000. In 1969, Jews made up 1.5% of the Party (an over-representation factor of 1.67). As other nationalities, especially Asians, are increasingly brought into the Party, and as the Party's recruitment policies increasingly favour the working class, the percentage of Jews in the Party has been declining, even while their absolute number has been increasing. Between 1920 and 1940 the percentage of Jews in the Party fluctuated around 4.5% to 5.0%. The percentage of Jews in the principal leading body of the Party, the Central Committee, is proportional to the number of Jews in the population.

In 1976, three Jews were elected to the 330 person Central Committee. In the 1920s, 25% of the Central Committee was Jewish, 10% in the late 1930s, 2-3% in the 1950s, and .3% in the 1960s. Given the strong representation of members from working class and peasant backgrounds on the Central Committee, and the increasing political mobilization of the more backward nationalities, that the proportion of Jews now accords with their percentage of the population should be considered neither extraordinary nor exemplifying discrimination.

The number of Jews elected to all local Soviets between 1959 and 1973 has averaged about 7,000 per election, or about .4% of all Soviet delegates (an under-representation factor of about .50). In 1970 and 1974 six Jews were elected to the Supreme Soviet: roughly proportionate to their share of the population.

Very few Jews now occupy prominent positions in the Party or government apparatus, in contrast to the pre- 1948 situation when Jews were prominent in all major aspects of government and Party activities. In the early 1970s the highest ranking Jewish person was the Deputy Minister for Supplies, V. Dymshits, who was also the highest ranking Jewish person on the Party's Central Committee; another was Alexander Chakovsky, the editor of the influential Literary Gazette. Lev Shapiro, the first secretary of the Birobidzhan Party organization and also a member of the Central Committee, became increasingly influential during the 1970s.

The evidence seems to point to a certain distrust of Jews in sensitive top leadership positions, initially aroused during the 1948-53 ' anti-cosmopolitan' /anti-Zionist campaign, and reborn after the 1967 Israeli-Arab Six Day War, when many Soviet Jews adopted pro-Israeli sympathies - thus manifesting opposition to Soviet policies. While there seems to be no substantial evidence for discrimination against Jews as Party members or in middle level Party and government positions, the evidence is compatible with some political discrimination against them for the top leadership roles as heads of ministries, Politburo members and first secretaries of leading Party organisations.

Given the long history of Jews having filled leading roles in the Party, which continued throughout the Stalin period, this seems to reflect Soviet doubts about historically specific Jewish loyalties on the question of Israel/Zionism, rather than classical anti-Semitic attitudes.

***Anti-Semitism in the USSR***

Not surprisingly, the virulent anti-Semitism of all classes in the pre-1917 Russian Empire has left remnants of anti-Semitic attitudes, especially among older, less educated and more rural populations, even after two generations of Soviet education. To the extent that such attitudes linger on, in spite of official Party policies designed to eradicate them, must be distinguished from the economic and political policies and educational campaigns of the Party.

Evidence concerning whether or not Jews in the Soviet Union experienced a significant amount of interpersonal anti-Semitism is mixed. Studies of recent Soviet emigree's anti-Semitic experiences casts considerable doubt on the theory that interpersonal anti-Semitism is a major factor in the country, A 1973 survey of 2,527 emigrants from the USSR in Israel found that 25% of those who had been nationalist activists in the USSR claimed never personally to have experienced an incident of anti-Semitism. In another survey of emigrants bound for Israel only 39% claimed that anti-Semitism in the USSR was a primary reason for their emigration. It is of interest to note that many more emigrants, bound for the US rather than for Israel, claimed both to have experienced anti-Semitism and that such experiences were the primary reason for their emigration. Anti-Soviet pro-Jewish emigrant observers, such as Gitelman, draw the reasonable conclusion that a language of motives focusing on anti-Semitism has been formulated that maximizes the probability of being accepted into the US, that is, affirms the claim to legitimate refugee status. Asserting the desire to make more money or to advance one's career as the reason for emigration to the US would not be effective.

***Zionism and anti-Semitism***

From the beginning of the Soviet state in 1917, the Soviets, with various degrees of intensity, have systematically attacked Zionism as reactionary, pro- imperialist, racist and, since World War II, essentially Fascist. They share their analysis with most of the rest of the world's Marxists, including many Jewish Marxists, as well as with most progressive movements in Asia, Africa and Latin America; especially those in the Islamic world. Anti-Soviets, especially those sympathetic to Zionism and the Israeli state, often fallaciously accuse the Soviet Union of anti-Semitism because of Soviet attacks on Zionism. But the two are quite different. Anti-Semitism, the ideology that Jews are a race to be despised and that to discriminate against them is justified, is against the law in the Soviet Union and, as far as I can ascertain, totally absent from all official Party and government written matter. Anti-Zionism, the notion that Jews should not seek or support a separate state in which all Jews maintain solidarity solely amongst themselves - rather than with individuals of other ethnic groups - is official state and Party policy.

Soviet anti-Zionist propaganda includes such themes as the following:

(1) that most international Jewish organizations in the West are controlled by Jewish capitalists and, therefore, operate against the interest of workers; (2) that Israel endeavours to establish an inherently anti- Communist 'fifth column' inside the Socialist countries; (3) that Zionism and Israel are 'implacable enemies of the socialist camp'; 4) that Israel is intent on building a 'Greater Israel' from the Nile to the Euphrates, where the Israelis would be a kind of master race comparable to that expounded in Nazi ideology for the Aryans; (5) that the Israeli state's ruling class jeopardizes the very existence of Israel as a state by the expansionist and militarist policies they follow; and: (6) that Zionism, as practised by the Israeli state in relation to the Arabs, is closely paralleled by the treatment of Jews by German Fascists.

Claims that the Soviet Union engages in anti-Semitic propaganda can invariably be reduced to statements such as these about Zionism, or to examples of anti-religious propaganda which, as applied to Judaism, do not differ qualitatively from that applied to Islam or Christianity. It is difficult to see how anti- Zionism and propaganda against the religious aspect of Judaism can justify the claim that, similar to Fascist anti-Semitic propaganda, the USSR considers Jews to be racially inferior. Such, however, is the implication of most statements that employ examples of anti-Zionism to support the contention of Soviet anti-Semitism.

Indicative of Zionist allegations of official Soviet anti-Semitism was the response of some Jewish dissidents, in November 1980, to an article in the Young Pioneer's Newspaper which attacked Zionism as 'modern day Fascism' calling it 'the main enemy of peace on Earth'. This article went on to argue that Zionists who control 'the major portion' of the US mass media have 'orchestrated anti-Soviet campaigns and opposed the strategic arms limitation treaty', and that 'Jewish bankers and billionaires' established the Jewish Defence League which 'terrorizes' Soviet diplomats in New York, and that Jewish bankers acted to 'defend their own class interests'. In commenting on this article, Jewish dissidents in the Soviet Union said that:

"We regard it as one of the worst examples of anti-Semitic writings to have appeared in Soviet publications in recent years. , . . Even more unfortunately, it is the first time in recent memory that anything so blatant has appeared in material intended for children."

If such statements are indeed the most blatant examples of official anti- Semitism that Zionist critics of the Soviet system can find, one can be assured that there is no official anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union.

The Six Day War between Israel and the Arab states, which was won decisively by Israel, generated much sympathy for the Israelis among many Soviet Jews. Given the Soviet's active support for Egypt and Syria in this war, and their strong commitment to opposing Israeli expansionism, and to the creation of a Palestinian state (it should be noted that the Soviets have never advocated the elimination of the state of Israel), such sympathy for its enemies aroused concern. Beginning in 1967 a Zionist dissident movement began to gain credibility within the Soviet Union; it manifested itself in such activities as large numbers of non-religious Jewish youths gathering around synagogues to demonstrate their support for Zionist ideas and Israel's cause, as well as the promotion of emigration to Israel. Jewish dissidents came to participate in the full range of dissident activities which focused on attacking Soviet policies and institutions in interviews with Western reporters, and in documents smuggled out of the Soviet Union.

The Soviet government's response was to step up its anti-Zionist propaganda campaign to a considerable extent, emphasizing the six themes itemized above. In 1966 only ten articles attacking Zionism were reported in the Soviet press, in 1969 there were 42, and at the peak of the anti-Zionist campaign in 1970, there were 204. 90 The post-1967 campaign was largely directed towards persuading Soviet Jews not to leave the USSR for Israel.

***The Post- 1967 Jewish Emigration from the USSR***

Throughout the 1960s about 1,000 Jews a year emigrated from the USSR to Israel; mostly on the grounds of reunification with their families. After the 1967 War, significant numbers of Jews began to apply to leave the USSR for Israel. In 1971, the government, apparently recognizing that its campaign to persuade Zionist Jews to stay was ineffective, began to issue numerous emigration visas for Israel. In 1971, approximately 13,000 Jews emigrated to Israel; approximately equal to the total number of those who had left for Israel in the previous 12 years. 92 From 1972 to 1977 approximately 30,000 Jews left for Israel each year, and in 1978 and 1979, when emigration became easier, roughly 50,000 left each year. Virtually any Jews wishing to leave were granted emigration visas during these latter years. Emigration declined after 1979, indicating that most of those who wished to leave had already done so, as well as a stricter emigration policy coincident with the revived Cold War.

Between 1968 and 1976, 133,000 Jews left the USSR, approximately 6,2% of all Soviet Jews; by the beginning of 1980 the percentage had risen to roughly 12%, a total of approximately 250,000. In the early 1970s, Roy Medvedev, usually an accurate source of information about the dissident community in the USSR, estimated that between 200,000 and 300,000 Jews would apply to leave. Maximum estimates from anti-Soviet sources speculated that the figure would reach 500,000, that is 25% of all Soviet Jews. 94 The decline in emigration in 1980 and 1981 indicated that the Medvedev estimate was probably correct - that is, almost all who had wanted to leave had left.

Those who left the USSR had been heavily concentrated in certain areas of the country. Over 50% who applied for exit visas between 1968 and 1976 were from the five Republics of Georgia, Uzbekistan, Latvia, Lithuania and Moldavia. Generally, Jews who emigrated, during that period at least, were either from areas newly amalgamated with the USSR (Latvia, Lithuania, Moldavia or the Western Ukraine) where they had not yet fully integrated themselves into Soviet life, or from Soviet Georgia where, although conditions were exceptionally good for Jews, their brand of Judaism virtually mandated their emigration to the 'Holy Land". Over 50% of all Georgian Jews migrated - mostly to Israel - as did 22% of Latvian, 41% of Lithuanian, 13% of Moldavian and 8% of Uzbek Jews between 1968 and 1976.

This contrasted sharply with the picture for the Soviet heartland of the Russian Republic, the Ukraine and Belorussia, where, according to the 1970 census, 80% of Soviet Jews live. In the same period only 1 .9% of Russian Jews left the country, as did 1 .6% of Belorussian Jews and 5.5% of Ukrainian Jews, most of whom were from the western third of the Republic — formerly part of Poland. Less than 12% (about 16.000) of the total Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union between 1968 and 1976 was from Russia proper.

These figures indicate that until the mid-1970s the motives for emigration were overwhelmingly religious and cultural, and neither as a result of anti-Semitism nor general dissatisfaction with Soviet life. Seemingly, the vast majority of Jews who had been part of the USSR since the Revolution were quite content to live in the Soviet Union. The emergence of a different motive in the mid-1970s is indicated by a radical change in the destination of Jewish emigrants. In 1974, 18.8% chose to go to the US and the other Western capitalist countries rather than to Israel, as did 37.2% in 1975, and 49.1% in 1976, while only 4.2% chose such destinations in 1973. In 1979 and 1980 only about one-third of Soviet Jewish emigres went to Israel, in 1981 20%, rnost now preferring the higher incomes and professional advancement possible in the US. Many Jews who originally migrated to Israel re-emigrated and settled in the US. This suggests that the desire to maintain Jewish culture or help build the Zionist state, has been superseded by the desire for financial gain and to advance one's career, An increased proportion of Russian, Ukrainian and Belorussian secular Jewish emigres are another manifestation of this change of motive.

Perhaps the most significant observation to be made about Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union after 1970 is the relatively small percentage (3% to 4%) who availed themselves of the opportunity to leave the Soviet heartland. Presented with the opportunity either to live in a predominantly Jewish culture in Israel, or obtain a significantly higher standard of living in the USA, 95%-97% chose to remain in the Soviet Union. It should be noted that, over the period 1970-79, only 5.1% of Moscow Jews emigrated, even though in the latter part of this decade it was very easy for Jews to do so. Emigres were mainly those Jews on the margin of the mainstream of Soviet life together with a relatively small number of professionals throughout the country.

Western attempts to present the Soviet Union as a virulently anti-Semitic society cannot be substantiated. Historically, the Jewish people in the USSR have fared, and continue to fare, very well in almost all respects. Jews are over-represented in the highest paying occupations, in the skilled professions, in the institutions of higher education and in all except the top levels in the Communist Party; but, as was noted previously, Jews are no longer over-represented in state legislative and top administrative positions. There is no evidence of official or Party approved anti-Semitism, and little evidence of interpersonal anti-Semitic expressions. The majority of Jews are fully integrated into Soviet life and demonstrate their support for Soviet institutions.

Conclusion

As is the case for the Soviet Asian Republics, there is no evidence of exploitation or economic discrimination by the Soviet government in the European Republics ; with rapid industrialization their economies have all prospered. Additionally, education, books, newspapers, theatre and so on in the various native languages have been actively promoted. Although, as a result of the integration of Jewish people into modern Soviet society, traditional Jewish culture is dying out, the Jewish people, too, have thrived. In short, the success of Soviet policy towards the European and Asian Republics in the USSR is one of the principal accomplishments of the Soviet system.

Albert Szymanski, Human Rights in the Soviet Union (1984)

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brigdh · 7 years

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Reading Wednesday

Bears in the Streets: Three Journeys Across a Changing Russia by Lisa Dickey. A sort-of travel book by an American woman who speaks Russian. In 1995 she spent several months traveling across Russia as part of one of the very first real-time updating travel blogs; she did the same journey in 2005, then for the Washington Post; and now she's done it again in 2015, this time as the basis for this book. Each time she meets the same people (well, mostly: some have died, moved away, or simply don't want to talk to her again) and tries to assess how their lives have changed over the last ten or twenty years. I call it a "sort-of" travel book because it's not meant to be a guide for tourists or to convey the physical experience of her journey. Rather it's an attempt to explain the culture and people of Russia to her audience of Westerners, since they believe – as least according to several of her encounters – that Russia is full of "bears in the streets". Dickey visits a wide variety of people: lighthouse keepers in Vladivostok, a rabbi in Birobidzhan (capital of the Jewish Autonomous Region), farmers in Buryatia who trace their history back to Genghis Khan, scientists studying Lake Baikal, a gay man in Novosibirsk, an excessively wealthy family in Chelyabinsk near the Ural mountains, the mother of a soldier in Kazan, a rap star in Moscow, and a 98-year-old woman in St Petersburg, old enough to remember the last tsar, among others. The selection is a bit random, but they all end up having interesting stories or perspectives, and Dickey's writing is warm, funny, and friendly. A recurring theme is Dickey worrying about telling these off-and-on friends of hers about her life: back in America, she's married to another woman. However, each time she ends up coming out, she finds acceptance and nonchalance. My one critique of the book is that I wanted more about politics. Well, look at the news any day for the last year; of course I did. I know the American perspective, but I would have liked to hear something about the "average Russian" (as much as such a thing exists) view. But she actively avoids discussing anything remotely political; the few times someone else brings it up, she changes the topic as soon as possible. And I understand wanting to avoid fights! Whether out of fear because she's alone, respect because she's a guest, or just kindness because no one likes hurt feelings, it is completely relatable to focus on what you have in common instead of on disagreements. And yet I was just so curious and over and over again Dickey refuses to go there. Besides all of that, her trip was in 2015 – it's not her fault, but in some ways that already seems so outdated in terms of American/Russian politics. Ah, well. It's still a very enjoyable book, if a bit shallower than I wanted it to be. I read this as an ARC via NetGalley. House of Names by Colm Toibin. A retelling of the Greek myth of the House of Atreus: Agamemnon, heading off to fight the Trojan War, sacrifices his daughter to gain the favor of the gods. His wife Clytemnestra is understandably not happy about this, and upon Agamemnon's (eventual) return home, she murders him with the assistance of her new lover. However their other children, Orestes and Electra, decide to get revenge for their father, and Clytemnestra is murdered in her turn. Toibin deviates little from this traditional plot; what value his retelling does have is supposedly in the language and psychological realism of the characters. Unfortunately neither worked for me. The writing is distancing, meandering, and flatly reactive. Orestes and Electra in particular are oddly passive; they spend most of the book having no idea of the politics or history around them, and their attempts to gain power or knowledge are halfhearted at best. Orestes explicitly prefers the life of an unknown farmer to that of the son of a king. Most of the actual action is kept offstage, and we're left with endless pages of characters remembering what happened, or planning for what will happen next, but never actually doing anything. It ends up feeling fanficcy – which is not a criticism I normally apply to retellings! But this really does read like a long series of cut scenes: we already know the plot, so here's some prettily written navel-gazing to fill the inbetweens. It's hard to imagine how anyone could take a story with such powerful themes of revenge and justice and guilt and familial entanglements and turn it into something boring and apathetic, but Toibin managed it. It's Greek myth with all the characters turned into phlegmatic Hamlets – not a great idea. I love retellings, but they need to add something to the original: perhaps give it a new twist, or simply be a very well-done version of a favorite story. House of Names doesn't qualify. Your time would be better spent with any of the ancient Greek versions. I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.

(Link to DW for easier commenting)

#books #book reviews #lisa dickey #colm tóibín #netgalley

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grootpoepjeplasjehoofd · 5 years

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Wait what’s the icon. I don’t get it

It’s a Soviet booklet titled “Red Zion” and it’s either about Crimea, where there was an active attempt to set up Jewish communes as an alternative to Zionism, or Birobidzhan, an autonomous Jewish republic in the Russian far east which was set up as the Soviet answer to Zionism

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cristinacori · 7 years

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Birobidzhan, a day in Sion Soviet Union

I arrive in this small province-town on a sunny Sunday when not a single living soul strolls around. Birobidzhan is the capital of the Jewish Autonomous Region, created from nothing in 1934 because of Stalin’s behest. In the USSR, Judaism was reduced to a mere line in the Soviet internal passport, in point number 5, introduced in 1932, where any and every citizen was required to declare their ethnicity.

Although the idea of a Russian Sion in a country famous for its pogroms may sound weird, the advent of the Soviet Union was actually a blessing for the Russian Jewish community. In the 1920s, indeed, in line with the communist principles of equality and with the idea of a multi-ethnic empire that the USSR had of itself, anti-Semitism became a state crime. The residence area, the only place in the western fringes of the Russian Empire where Jews were allowed to live, was dismantled and anti-discrimination policies were enacted. The founding of a Jewish capital of the USSR represented an acceptable solution based on the principle of self-determination in force in Bolshevik Russia. The project was not “a good deed” towards an unloved ethnicity, but it was part of the wider population outline of Siberia; it was indeed the Soviet experiment which provided the transfer of thousands of people in the Russian Far East and the creation of a network of cities in order to develop these inhospitable lands, so far away from the capital city. As a matter of fact, anyone would think of living in this marshy plain, populated by annoying gnats, which in winter reaches -30 °C, if it were not enticed by the Soviet high-sounding promises.

Many of the transfers to Siberia in those years were mostly forced, but as far as the Jews were concerned, there was no need to insist: they moved there of their own volition. Presented as the Jewish Autonomous Region, the “new promised land” immediately attracted many Ukrainian and Belarusian Jews who, enhanced and boosted by the enthusiasm of starting a new life, came down here. Many flocked here, about 30,000, in this small Siberian Sion built on the Bira and Bidzhan rivers (tributaries of the Amur River from which the town takes its name) and founded schools and Jewish institutions. They brought their language with them, Yiddish, their religion and culture, which with small Soviet reinterpretations was tolerated, as well as Hebrew characters, which still stand out on some shop windows.

Good times, however, did not last long because in fickle Stalinist political Soviet Russia, anti-Semitism had never really been eradicated. At the end of the Thirties Stalin and Zhdanov, one of the major contributors in setting the Soviet cultural policy, a campaign against “rootless cosmopolitanism” began; a propaganda designed to flush the hypothetical internal enemies out. All those involved in the pro-Western climate were attacked and the Jews, accused of servility to the West and alien to Russian culture, were the first to pay the drastic consequences of this offensive ideological-cultural matrix.

Consequently, in order to escape the erratic antipathy towards the community, many left, mostly to Palestine. The city soon ended up depopulated of Jews. Today, out of a population of about 176,000 inhabitants in the region only 1,628 are of Jewish ethnicity and of the old Birobidzhan, only a faded memory that surfaces in a few sporadic clues remains: the menorah in front of the train station, the street names written in Hebrew, a very modern synagogue and some kosher shops. Walking in this strange Far East Russian city, there’s no more Jewish culture left.

I step again in a train. I have few days of travel to reach Vladivostok, the Russian outpost on the Pacific. In the wagon, I am the only foreign person and, travelling alone in third class without speaking a word of the local language, I must look really wicked to the other passengers’ eyes, who sometimes stare at me with undisguised curiosity. Perhaps I even aroused the compassion of some of them. In fact, at one point, as I sit in the hallway to the side of the kettle to contemplate the passing landscape from the window, a guy approaches me. He is holding the stachan, the glass bearing the emblem of the national railway company, and a tea bag. Speaking fluent Russian, he informs me that a few yards away, in another wagon, there are two other foreign travellers. He wanted to tell me, just in case I got bored and wanted to talk to someone who could understand my language. I look at him questioningly: I did not understand a word of what he had said (a girl who speaks a bit of English would have explained me afterwards), but in the end, not knowing what to do or what to say, I just smile like a fool. The boy stares at me waiting for a sensible reaction, then he pours the boiling water into his glass and he went back to his seat.

Birobidzhan, a day in Sion Soviet Union Birobidzhan, a day in Sion Soviet Union I arrive in this small province-town on a sunny Sunday when not a single living soul strolls around.

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mashkaroom · 3 years

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i think the reason that there are two such distinct narratives about birobidzhan -- one which is “how sad that jewishness failed here” and the other that “how cool that quite a bit of jewishness continues to flourish here!” -- ultimately comes down to what you think birobidzhan’s goals should have been. if your ideal birobidzhan is a semi-sovereign jewish state, then obviously you’ll look at the low number of jews and lack of national autonomy and see a failure. while if you wanted a bastion of yiddish culture (which is the camp i’m personally in) then you see the yiddish newspaper, yiddish songs chorus, yiddish on the signage, and IMMERSIVE YIDDISH PROGRAMS IN SCHOOLS and think “it’s crazy how much jewish culture survived here despite the low number of jews”. Anyway, I think a historiography of birobidzhan would be hugely interesting.

#there's like 1500-2000 jews in the JAO which is just around 1% of the population #like. that is a CRAZY amount of jewish culture for that number of jews!#i also think it is very actively problematic to judge success of jewishness by how many jews there are by number #esp since the numbers on the russian census are referring specifically to genetic composition rather than cultural background #i wouldn't say that the kids learning yiddish become jewish in the same way that we became russian through assimilation but like #idk i think you could look at birobidzhan as a really interesting case study with regards to national jewish identity #i guess i probably wouldn't say that non-jews living in israel become jewish by assimilation #but that might have more to do with israel not being the origin of modern jewish identity in the same way that russia is of russian identity #like i just don't know is a child from a korean buddhist family who grew up in birobidzhan doing the majority of his schooling in yiddish #and learning jewish values and stuff #is that kid less jewish than me?#who grew up very connected to russianness and not even identifying as jewish?#bc while probably my russianness is to some degree facilitated through jewishness #i mean so is his!#so what is it that make me more jewish?#blood?#does that not seem kinda problematic?#like surely that kid is at least partially jewish in the same way that i am american?#idk i would love to hear your guys's opinions #somebody sponsor me to write aformentioned historiography #could be a phd project i guess!

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stmartinspress-blog · 8 years

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The following excerpt is from Bears On the Streets: Three Journeys Across a Changing Russia, a nuanced, deeply researched look at the lives and beliefs of ordinary Russians over time. It goes on sale January 31st.

At one-thirty in the morning, 15 hours after leaving Vladivostok, my train pulled into Birobidzhan. Lugging my bags onto the platform, I looked up at the sight that had so surprised me back in 1995: on the station building, the word Birobidzhan was written not only in Russian, but in Yiddish too.

I glanced for just a moment, as I was nervous to be arriving alone in the dead of night. Fortunately, a few other people had straggled off the train, so I followed them toward a parking lot where, to my relief, there were a couple of waiting taxis. I climbed into one and told the young driver, “Hotel Vostok.”

The boxy, six-story Vostok sits in the center of Birobidzhan, just a few blocks from the train station. I carried my bags up the front steps and into the lobby, and an older woman seated behind the front desk took my passport. Then she looked at her com- puter and said, “You booked your room for the twelfth. But today is the thirteenth.” She tsk-tsked, shaking her head. “You should have booked for the thirteenth, saved yourself some money.”

“But it’s two a.m. on the thirteenth,” I told her. “Check-in time is noon. I wouldn’t have wanted to wait that long to get into my room.”

“Oh, no,” she said. “We put people in rooms as they arrive. It’s the thirteenth today, so you should have booked for the thir- teenth. Very simple. That’s your mistake.” Now I was irritated, but it made no sense to argue. As she fiddled with papers behind the desk, I looked to the side and saw a freestanding rack labeled “Souvenir Shop.” The only items displayed were a dozen small, framed paintings of black-hatted Jewish men in various poses—carrying menorahs, playing poker, playing clarinet while floating in a flock of birds, staring a giant fish in the face. They were bizarre, bordering on anti- Semitic, and I wondered idly why the hotel didn’t just carry postcards instead. Then, the woman interrupted my reverie by asking how I wanted to pay for my room.

I handed her a credit card. “Ohhh,” she said, and pinched it between her forefinger and thumb as though handling a rare document. She fished around under the desk, pulled out a hand- held credit card reader, and said, “I never do this. I hope I don’t mess it up.” She ran the card through the slot very, very slowly. Not surprisingly, it didn’t register. “You have to do it a little faster,” I told her. “Don’t be afraid.” She tried a couple more times, and finally the card registered.

She peered again at her computer. “It says to type in the last four numbers on the card,” she said. “And then press oak.” Press oak? She was speaking Russian, but she said this last word in English, like the tree. I leaned over the counter to look, and on her computer screen was a prompt with the word “OK.” This was becoming a very entertaining hotel check-in.

After some hesitation, the woman managed to type in the four numbers and press oak. Then she told me my room num- ber and wished me a good night.

“And the key?” I asked.

“There’s a dezhurnaya upstairs,” she told me. A dezhurnaya! In the Soviet era, hotels always had dezhurnayas—ladies sta- tioned on each floor who kept the room keys and monitored comings and goings—but I hadn’t encountered such a system in years. Birobidzhan truly did seem to be stuck in a time warp, which was perhaps not surprising, considering the odd history of the place.

In the late 1920s, more than two decades before the State of Israel was established, Joseph Stalin decided to create a Jewish homeland in Russia. But not just anywhere in Russia: the gov- ernment’s decree designated land “near the Amur River in the Far East”—a desolate, swampy outpost 4,000 miles away from Moscow. If the map of Russia were a dartboard with Moscow at the bull’s-eye, Birobidzhan, nestled above the northeast corner of China, would be the spot where a drunk guy accidentally chucked his dart into the wall.

To convince Jews to move there, the government offered free railroad passage, free meals along the way, and 600 rubles to each settler. Soviet propaganda organs produced pictures of smiling workers hauling grain and driving tractors, all of them tanned and happy under the perpetually sunny skies of Stalin’s promised land. Thousands of Jews took up the government’s offer, coming from not only Russia but all over the world— Argentina, the United States, even Palestine—to settle in the new Jewish region.

Some came to escape anti-Semitism. Many came because they had nothing, and therefore nothing to lose. And even more came in the early 1930s to escape starvation, as tens of thou- sands of Soviets began suffering and dying under Stalin’s brutal collectivization policies in Ukraine. As waves of migrants con- tinued to flow here, the Soviet government in 1934 designated the area as the Jewish Autonomous Region, with Birobidzhan as its capital.

This sounded pretty, but the reality was less so. The defining characteristics of the Jewish Autonomous Region were freez- ing winters, blisteringly hot summers and clouds of ravenous mosquitoes. So, even though 41,000 Jews arrived during that first decade, 28,000 of them turned around and left by the end of 1938. Yet new migrants just kept on coming, and by 1948 the region’s Jewish population had swelled to 30,000. Then came a sudden, brutal wave of anti-Jewish repression, as the Soviet government closed schools and synagogues, arrested writers, and drove Jewish cultural and religious life under- ground. From that point on, the Jewish population here began a slow decline.

A visitor to Birobidzhan during the Brezhnev era might hear older men speaking Yiddish in the park, but apart from that, not much marked this place as a onetime Jewish homeland.

Glasnost led to a modest revival of Jewish culture in the 1980s, but it also led to a new, possibly final, exodus, as thousands of Jews took advantage of newly relaxed travel laws to leave the country. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the floodgates truly opened, and thousands more streamed out, in- cluding most of the remaining Jews of Birobidzhan. By the end of 1992, fewer than 5,000 Jews were left here.

So, when Gary and I arrived in Birobidzhan in September 1995, we weren’t sure how much—if any—Jewish culture we’d find. I asked around to see if there was a synagogue in town, but nobody seemed to know. A taxi driver agreed to take us on a search, and after driving in circles, we managed to find a small wooden building with wrought-iron Stars of David in the win- dows. I knocked on the door, and a short, white-bearded man wearing a yarmulke answered.

This was Boris Kaufman, the self-appointed keeper of what turned out to be Birobidzhan’s only synagogue. There was no rabbi in Birobidzhan, Boris told us, so there were no official prayer services here. But twice a week, he led services for a small group of mostly elderly women. “Please join us for the next one, if you’d like,” he said. We eagerly accepted, excited to witness a service in this historic remnant of the once-thriving Jewish Autonomous Region.

When Gary and I arrived at the appointed time, Boris asked me to put on a headscarf. I wasn’t familiar with Jewish rituals, so I didn’t think anything of it, but once the service started it quickly became clear that Boris was making up his own rules. Because what we ended up witnessing was more evangelical tent revival than Jewish service.

Boris read from a Hebrew prayer book, shuddering and rock- ing back and forth in apparent religious ecstasy, while the old women, weeping and waving their hands, called out verses from the New Testament. “Jesus said, ‘I am the way, the truth and life!’ ” one shouted, as Boris rocked in his chair, a little smile on his lips. It was a jarring scene, as Boris later acknowledged. “Per- haps it bothers some people that we worship Jesus here; I don’t know. I’ve never asked them,” he told me. “But it’s not as though we took over the synagogue from Jews who wanted to hold ser- vices. The generation of older Jews who used to come gradually died out, and no one else came to fill the void.”

Yet Boris, who was ethnically Jewish, also told us he wanted to see Birobidzhan’s Jewish culture preserved. Every morning before the sun rose, he and his mentor, a twenty-something former Yeshiva student named Oleg Shavulski, sang Jewish prayers. A slender, sad-eyed man with a neatly trimmed beard, Oleg taught Boris how to wear the tefillin and translated Hebrew words the older man didn’t know. When we asked about the Jesus-worshiping gatherings in the synagogue, he sighed heavily. “Boris is confused,” he said. “But he will come around eventually. One does not come to the truth in one day or two days. It takes many days.” Oleg was one of the most vocal proponents of revitalizing Jewish culture in Birobidzhan. He told us there were promising signs: Sunday school classes (taught by Oleg) had started up again, a new cultural center had opened, and School No. 2 was not only offering Yiddish classes again, they were also putting on a Rosh Hashanah pageant the following week.

Yet it was hard to avoid the feeling that this was too little, too late. With no rabbi, no functioning synagogue, and no prospects for getting either anytime soon, how much longer could the city’s Jewish community survive?

For that matter, how long could Birobidzhan itself survive in the face of its shattered economy? In the four years since the collapse of the USSR, factories had closed down, thousands of people had lost their jobs, and many who were still working hadn’t been paid in months. With its tree-lined streets and small-town feel, Birobidzhan wasn’t without its charms, but the lack of employment and a persistent sense of malaise were like a cloud hovering just overhead.

This place was dirt poor, and what little money did trickle in went straight to Sokhnut, an organization whose main purpose here was to help Jews get out. “No one wants to invest any money in this city,” Oleg said bitterly. “The easiest thing in the world is to leave, to quit. But there will always be Jews in Birobidzhan, and we must make it possible for them to have a normal spiri- tual life. Someone must be here to take care of those who stay.” This, we discovered, was the central question for Birobid- zhan’s Jews in 1995: Stay, and work to revive the city? Or call it a day, and move to Israel (or Europe, or North America)?

Sokhnut director Mikhail Diment, a weary-looking man of 60 whose office was decorated with a large Israeli flag, spent every day working to help people leave. “We are the one race that knows exactly where it came from,” he told me. “We are linked by faith, by the Torah. And Israel is our homeland.” Those who wanted to leave, he said, should feel no guilt for doing so.

Author David Waiserman, who was born and raised in Birobidzhan, was dismayed by the mass exodus. “The Jews who are leaving this city are leaving for one reason: econom- ics,” he told me. “They got a call from somebody in Israel who said, ‘Hey, Moishe! Get over here and have a look at this place! They got nice cars here, and great food!’ So the people go.” He paused. “But my parents built this city. They are lying in its graveyard. How can I just pick up and go? This is where my roots are.” Maria Shokhtova, a Yiddish teacher at School No. 2, told me that during her childhood in Ukraine, her father prayed “every morning and every night. He knew all the rituals, and we used to go to the synagogue.” But these days, she didn’t do any of those things—and she didn’t know anyone else who did, either. “I live in a little village called Waldheim with my daughter now,” she told me. “When we first came to Waldheim, it was all Jewish. Now you can hardly find any Jews there.”

Alexander Yakubson, a 48-year-old lawyer, was truly torn about what to do. He and his family had emigrated to Israel in 1991, then returned to Birobidzhan three years later to find it a changed place. “When we left Russia in 1991, the economy was more stable, the factories were still working. There was almost no crime,” he said. “When we returned last year, the picture was totally different. There are so many unemployed here now, so many people are poor. Now the Russians envy the Jews in this country, because the Jews can leave.”

“My wife wants to go back to Israel,” he said. “I’m not sure what I want.” Hearing the anguish in his voice, I couldn’t help but think that perhaps when you have two homelands, you really have none. Because you never know where you truly belong.

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