COMMUNISM AND ANTI-SEMITISM

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP80M01009A000500720051-0
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 11
• Document Creation Date: December 27, 2016
• Document Release Date: July 22, 2013
• Sequence Number: 51
• Publication Date: May 1, 1960
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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"PROBLEMS OF COMMUNISM" -- Vol. IX No. 3 -- May-June 1960
Communism and Anti-Semitism
?"Judaism kills the love for the Soviet Motherland."
?Sovetskaia Moldavia, July 23, 1959.
"They do not like collective work, group discipline . . .
They are individualists. . .. Jews are interested in every-
thing, they want to probe into everything, they discuss
everything, and end up by having profoundly different
opinions."
?Khrushchev in an interview with Serge
Goussard, correspondent of Le Figaro
(Paris), April 9, 1958.
THE EXISTENCE OF ANTI-SEMITISM in the USSR,
its employment as a tool by the Communist leadership,
and its absorption into the Weltanschauung of the "New
Class" should no longer come as a surprise to anyone
familiar with the realities of Soviet life. Yet few are
aware of the genealogy of this unique phenomenon?
of its historical roots and ideological evolution. For it
is a fact that anti-Semitism is not alien to the radical
tradition?in Western Europe, and more particularly in
Russia. Indeed, the ancestry of Communist anti-Semi-
tism may be traced to the percursors of Leninism and
Stalinism?the revolutionary terrorists, the so-called
"Populists," who dominated the revolutionary scene in
Russia in the second half of the 19th century.
"Lubricant on the Wheel of Revolution"
When socialism as a current of political thought made
its appearance in Western Europe, it tended to look upon
the Jews with unfriendly eyes, regarding them as the
Mr. Goldhagen, formerly with the Russian Research
Center of Harvard University, and now teaching at
Hunter College, New York, is preparing a book ten-
tatively entitled A Political and Cultural History of
Soviet Jewry. This is his first contribution to Prob-
lems of Communism.
By Erich Goldhagen
embodiment of those qualities of social life which social-
ists denounced as evil and which they were sworn to
undo. Barred from the ownership of land and excluded
from the Guilds, the Jews had long ago been driven to
devote themselves primarily to the pursuit of commerce;
and throughout Western Europe the name Jew came to
be almost synonymous with that of trader. The belief
was thus born that the pursuit of money was a national
vocation of the Jews, enjoined by their religion and prac-
ticed with unrivaled skill and zeal. It seemed that the ?
spirit of commerce had found its purest embodiment and
its consummate practitioners in the Jews.1
The Jews thus incurred the contempt and hatred that
socialists harbored against the world of finance. The
comprehensive condemnation of commerce and finance
as useless and parasitic occupations, as unproductive
activities whereby those who shun honest labor could
derive undeserved riches from the toil of others was
bound to embrace the Jews. This attitude was reinforced
by the sinister tales which popular lore came to weave
around the name of Rothschild, whose enormous wealth
was believed to be a source of evil power?swaying
monarchs, making and unmaking governments, and
determining the destinies of nations. The vagaries of
history, its irrationalities, the injustices and sufferings
1 It is interesting to note, in this connection, that all utopian
reformers viewed money as a pernicious force serving no pur-
pose save that of breeding injustice and perverting authentic
human values, and foresaw its disappearance in the desired
society of the future. The citizens of Thomas More's Utopia,
for instance, "hold gold and silver up to scorn in every way
. . . . They hang gold rings from the ears of criminals, place
gold rings on their fingers, gold collars around their necks, and
gold crowns on their heads." (T. More, Utopia, New York,
1949, p. 44.) And Karl Marx, in his Nationale Ekonomie
und Philosophie, had the following to say about the evil influ-
ence of money: "It turns loyalty into disloyalty, love into hate,
virtue into vice, vice into virtue, slave into master, master into.
slave, stupidity into intelligence, intelligence into stupidity."
(Quoted in Kenneth Muir's "Marx's Conversion to Commu-
nism," The New Reasoner, London, No. 3, Winter 1957-58,
p. 63).
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which it inflicted were traced not to the impersonal forces
of economic and social processes but to villains of flesh
and blood to whom one could assign guilt and upon
whom one could discharge that hatred in which suffer-
ing and discontent often seek relief.
It was this outlook which Marx in part echoed in his
famous essay Zur Judenfrage:
What is the object of the Jew's worship in this world?
Usury. What is his worldly god? Money....
Money is the zealous one God of Israel, beside which no
other God may stand. Money degrades all the gods of
mankind and turns them into commodities. Money is the
universal and self-constituted value set upon all things. It
has therefore robbed the whole world, of both nature and
man, of its original value. Money is the essence of man's
life and work, which have become alienated from him.
This alien monster rules him and he worships it.2
In Russia, too, disdain towards the Jews was the prev-
alent attitude of the early revolutionaries. The abysmal
conditions of the Jews?constrained in their movement,
compelled to live only in assigned regions known as the
Pale of Settlement, and reduced (save for a tiny minor-
ity) to a state of poverty verging on starvation?evoked
little sympathy in the breasts of the radical intellectuals
of the 1870's and 1880's, however virulent their hatred
of the Tsarist autocracy. To be sure, the Jews were
wretched and poor, but their wretchedness and poverty
was not graced by those lofty virtues which the fertile
imagination of the revolutionaries ascribed to the Rus-
sian peasantry. Unlike the peasants, who earned their
meager subsistence by toil and who were regarded by
the intellectuals as noble beings endowed with the qual-
ities of selflessness and instinctive communalism, the
Jews were a work-shirking lot, engaging in the "para-
2 Karl Marx, A World Without Jews, New York 1959, p.
41. This is not to say that Marx was anti-Semitic in the ac-
cepted sense of the term. Indeed, the main theme and purport
of his essay was to expose the hollowness of the civic equality
granted by the bourgeois order. As for Marx's linking of Jews
and capitalism, the most original and freshest explanation of it,
in this author's opinion, was offered by the East German
scholar L. Koller, in his Zur Geschichte Der Buergerlichen
Gesellschaft (On the history of the Bourgeois Society) n.d.,
Halle/Saale, pp. 478-496?a unique exception to the otherwise
dreary gibberish that passes off as "social science" in the Com-
munist bloc. According to Koller, capitalism found its purest
manifestation in the Jewish ethos because unlike Gentile capital-
ists who, being linked to the native proletariat by ties of com-
mon nationhood, have endeavored to disguise and temper their
avarice and exploitative ambitions, the Jews knew no such
restraint. Strangers to the society in which they have lived, they
pursued their vocation with uninhibited ruthlessness and with-
out an embellishing guise. They thus have mirrored capitalism
in its stark nakedness.
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sitic" and "exploitative" occupations. Even poverty,
their only reward, could not redeem them.
But some revolutionaries did not content themselves
with passive disdain; they acclaimed and encouraged
active violence against the Jews.
IN THE SPRING AND SUMMER of 1881 a wave of
violence swept through the southern part of the Pale of
Settlement. Over one hundred Jewish communities were
visited by orgies of destruction, claiming, apart from
enormous material damage, scores of dead and hundreds
of wounded. This outbreak of unprovoked brute force
visited upon a defenseless community moved the Exec-
utive Committee of the Narodnaya Volya (People's
Will)?the largest revolutionary-terroristic organization
at that time?to issue a proclamation in Ukrainian on
August 30, 1881, blessing the riots and exhorting the
peasants to further violence against "the parasitic Jews"
and the "Tsar of the Jews". "The people of the
Ukraine", the proclamation stated, "suffer more than
anyone else from the Jews . . . you have already begun
to rise against the Jews . . . you have done well." 3
This proclamation cannot be simply explained, of
course, by the anti-Semitic spirit of the radical intelli-
gentsia. No doubt its authors were imbued with anti-
Semitic prejudices; yet it would be naive to assume, for
instance, that they were in earnest in affixing the label
"Tsar of the Jews" on Alexander III: his disdain for
the Jews, and his oppressive and discriminatory policies
against them were certainly known to the leaders of the
Narodnaya Volya. Thus there is little doubt that the
proclamation was first and foremost a calculated device.
Underlying it, apart from the Bakuninist conviction that
the "passion for destruction is a constructive passion,"
lay Machiavellian calculation, the wish and the hope
that the violence against the Jews would be extended to
the autocracy. By linking the Jews with the Tsar, the
leaders of the Narodnaya Volya sought to telescope the
pogroms into the social revolution, to fan its fire into
a conflagration engulfing the authorities. They were
consciously lying, but to their minds this was a "noble
lie," graced by the lofty purpose it served. The blood
of the Jews might have been wholly innocent, but it was
nonetheless the "lubricant on the wheels of revolution."
In the society of radical emigres in Geneva, one by
the name of Zhukovsky defended the pogroms in the
following terms:
3 Quoted in E. Tcherikover, geshikhte fun der yidisher arbeter
bavegung in di fareynikte shtatn (History of the Jewish Labor
Movement in the USA?in Yiddish) New York, 1945, Vol.
II, p. 174.
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' Sixty percent of the Jewish population are engaged in com-
merce. This is the background against which the peasant hunts
down the Jew. . . . To be sure, from a humanitarian stand-
point, it is a piece of barbarism when peasants fall like
savages upon a frightened Jew and beat him until he bleeds.
However, take this event in the context of social dynamics.
Why does he beat? Because [beating) is his political ballot.
He has no other way of venting his wrath against his ex-
ploitation by the government. It is indeed a pity that the
peasant beats the Jew?the most innocent of his exploiters.
But he beats, and this is the beginning of his struggle for
liberation. When . . . his fists will have grown strong and
hard he will strike those who are above the Jews.4
But even those radicals who did not view the pogroms
with approval could not bring themselves to call for an
end to the bloodshed. Anti-Semitism was endemic to
the Russian peasantry. It was its daily psychic bread
designed to still the grievances and frustrations born of
hunger--hunger for land and hunger for food. The
Russian intelligentsia which had for two decades tried
with only limited success to strike roots in the Russian
peasantry, to secure its confidence and to persuade it to
follow the intellectuals as the champions of its aspira-
tions, feared that by showing concern for the Jews they
would unwittingly alienate the peasants. To come out
in defense of the Jews would have branded them as
"Jewish stooges." Was it worth endangering, for the sake
of a small national minority, the cause of socialism?
These were the arguments with which radicals who had
dissociated themselves from violence justified their
refusal to come out publicly against the pogroms. The
radical philosopher P. L. Lavrov, who was to describe
anti-Semitism as the "most tragic epidemic of our era,"
declined to print a pamphlet against the pogroms sub-
mitted to him by the Social Democratic leader Akselrod:
I must confess that I regard this question as a very com-
plicated one, indeed an exceedingly difficult one for a party
which seeks to come closer to the people. Theoretically,
on paper, the question can be easily answered. But in view
of the prevailing popular passions and the need of the Rus-
sian socialists to have the people on their side whenever
possible the question is quite different.5
The New Spirit
The succeeding generation of Russian revolutionaries
did not share the Populist view that anti-Semitic out-
rages have a redemptive quality. Manifestations of
4 F. Kurski, "di zhenever grupe sotsialistn yidn un ir oyfruf"
(The Geneva Group of Jewish Socialists and its proclamation?
Yiddish), Historishe Shriftn, Vilna/Paris 1939, Vol. III, p. 561.
5Iz Arkhiva P. G. Akselroda (From the P. G. Akselrod
archive?in Russian) Berlin 1924, Vol. II, p. 30.
anti-Semitism were not tolerated in the Marxist-Socialist
movement which dominated the Russian revolutionary
scene during the next two decades. In his pamphlet
Our Differences (1884), which set forth the program
of the Social Democrats and the reasons for their oppo-
sition to the Narodnaya Volya, Plekhanov, the "father of
Russian Marxism," condemned the proclamation of 1881
as "a base flattery of the national prejudices of the Rus-
sian people." 6 Similarly Lenin, after the notorious
Kishinev pogrom in 1903, recalled with shame the "in-
famous proclamation" and called on all socialists to
defend the Jews against the mob as a matter of honor.
Indeed, by the turn of the century both Russian and
West European socialists tended to view anti-Semitism
in a new light. Hitherto, socialists had regarded it as
a misguided protest against existing social conditions by
petty bourgeois and proletarians--"the socialism of
fools," in the words of August Bebel. They had hoped
that sooner or later those ensnared by it would recog-
nize that not only capitalist Jews were the cause of their
misery but Gentile and Jewish capitalists alike; and that
this recognition would bring them into the fold of
socialism. But when it seemed that instead of being a
vestibule of socialism, anti-Semitism had become a use-
ful tool in the hands of the ruling class, the socialist
attitude changed. Anti-Semitism came to be treated
unequivocally as a hostile ideology. During the two
decades before 1917, there were few recorded overt
expressions of anti-Jewish bias in the Russian socialist
movement. In fact, there is no doubt that by and large
the leaders of the Russian socialist parties did not harbor
anti-Semitic sentiments. Such sentiments were certainly
absent from Lenin, who was a genuine "internationalist,"
singularly free from national intolerance, and deter-
minedly hostile to any manifestations of xenophobia or
"Great Russian chauvinism" on the part of his comrades-
in-arms.
Nevertheless, the Russian Social Democrats still
shunned prominent association with specifically Jewish
causes. To be sure, the central organs of their press
denounced anti-Semitism in forceful terms; but they did
not carry these denunciations in popular leaflets and
pamphlets. For a socialist agitator, working among the
grass-roots of the working-class, it was still unwise to
appear in the role of an advocate of the Jews.
After the October Revolution the Bolsheviks adopted
an uncompromising attitude against anti-Semitism. As
the White armies converged to extinguish the infant
regime with the battlecry "Beat the Jews and Save Rus-
G. V. Plekhanov, lzbrannye filosofskie proizvedeniia (Col-
lected Philosophical Works), Moscow 1956, Vol. I, p. 217.
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SOVIET CLAIMS
In my country, all peoples enjoy freedom for
the development of their culture. They can have
their theaters and their literature, and that in-
cludes the Jews. However, the Jewish population
has merged with the Russian in Russian culture
so fully that Jews participate in general culture
and literature . . .
?A. I. Mikoyan, New York, Jan. 15, 1959,
(transcript of the United Nations Corre-
spondence Association).
As far as the Jews are concerned, even if Jewish
schools were established, very few would attend
them voluntarily. . . . A university in the Yid-
dish language could never be established. There
would not be a sufficient number of students.
With regard to the Yiddish or Hebrew languages,
there is no demand for their use. . . .
?N. S. Khrushchev, Realites (Paris), May 1957
COMMUNIST QUESTIONS
Why has nothing appeared in Yiddish [in the
USSR]? Not a newspaper, not a book, not a
magazine! All the arguments we heard from
certain Soviet leaders that the Jews themselves do
not want Yiddish publications do not correspond
to reality. . . .
That the Soviet Jews are interested in having
a Yiddish newspaper can be seen from the fact
that close to 2000 copies of the Warsaw Folk,
shtimme come into the Soviet Union and are
avidly read. Even the Margn Frayhayt [US Com-
munist Yiddish daily] comes all the way to the
Soviet Union and is read eagerly.
?Ch. SuIler, Daily Worker (New York), Sept. 22, 1957.
What about the 3,000,000 who flocked to the
Yiddish concerts given sporadically in the USSR
in 1957 (a figure given by N. N. Kanilov, Vice-
Minister for Culture. . .)? Why should these
millions, or even thousands, be denied full facil-
ities to publish, speak, see plays, in what is still
their mother tongue, namely Yiddish)
If all facilities and help were extended to
[Jewish] culture and language between 1917 and
1948, what change has taken place in their status
after 1948 to warrant the cessation and elimina-
tion of this culture) I have not come across
a coherent Marxist argument . . . why Soviet
Yiddish writers should have their novels, stories
and poems published (in Yiddish) by left-wing
publications in capitalist countries . . . and not in
their country of origin, the USSR.
?A. Waterman, "On the Jewish Question,"
Marxism Today (London), April 1959.
38
sia," the denunciation of anti-Semitism as counter-revo-
lutionary became not only a duty enjoined by faith but a
course dictated by the imperatives of the struggle in
which the Bolsheviks were engaged. The weapon had
to be wrested from the hands of those seeking to restore
the ancien regime. Anti-Semitism was outlawed and
suppressed; and the Red Army was hailed by the Jews
as a protector and liberator from the White troops which
were bringing upon them nothing but death and destruc-
tion. There was exaggeration but no falsification in the
picture of Eastern Europe drawn by the American-
Yiddish poet, A. Liesin, who was not a Communist:
"While in all the countries surrounding Bolshevik Rus-
sia anti-Semitism is fanned with increasingly infernal
power . . . Bolshevik Russia presents an example of
humaneness and justice, the like of which the history of
the Jewish Diaspora has never seen before." 7 Anti-
Semitism could not figure in any indictment drawn up
against the Soviet dictatorship during the 1920's. But
with the advent of the 1930's a new picture began to
unfold itself.
Stalinist Nationalism
The revival of Great Russian nationalism under
Stalin's dispensation in the early 1930's created a climate
less congenial to the Jews than that which had prevailed
throughout the preceding decade. With the building of
"socialism in one country" proceeding apace, Bolshevik
Russia began to shed many of the features which revo-
lutionary enthusiasm and devotion had bestowed upon
her. A new spirit pervaded the party, disillusioned by
the dearth of revolutionary outbreaks in West Europe
to which it had looked forward in the days of Lenin and
Trotsky, and deeply immersed in its own "revolution
from above." Under these circumstances, the Russian
nationalist tradition, renounced and abused by the
sweeping wave of revolutionary triumph, gradually re-
asserted its claims, casting the revolutionary elan into
more traditional mold. Within these confining walls the
cosmopolitan radiance of the revolution grew dimmer
and dimmer. The old revolutionary leadership reared in
the tradition of Marxist internationalism was replaced
by a new generation of bureaucrats imbued with that
peculiar mixture of Marxist militancy and Russian chau-
vinism which henceforth was to mark the ethos of Soviet
society.
A chilly wind began to envelop the Jews, especially
the Jewish intelligentsia which had been everywhere in
7 A. Liesin, in di trukunft (Yiddish), January 1920, p. 1.
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the modern world the bearer of cosmopolitanism. In
this new climate the dictatorship was less disposed to
resist the envious and subdued demands that the high
proportion of the Jews in administrative positions and
universities be reduced and that the vacancies thus
created be filled by native sons. Indeed, the dictatorship
viewed such restrictive measures as salutary: they would
earn the regime fresh popularity at home, and at the
same time blunt the edge of anti-Communist propa-
ganda throughout the world (emanating from the ex-
treme right) that Mother Russia had fallen under the
domination of the Judeo-Communist conspiracy. Ac-
cordingly, the Soviet government proceeded to reduce
sharply the number of Jews in the leading bodies of the
party and government, to introduce a numerus clausus
into some institutions of higher learning, and virtually
to exclude Jews from the diplomatic service.8 To be a
Jew again became a source of discomfort and a handicap.
These measures did not spring from anti-Semitic sen-
timent in the strict traditional sense of the term, but
were motivated by coldly calculated raison d'etat. They
were sometimes accompanied by regrets (privately
voiced) about the necessity of sacrificing principles to
this greater consideration. Lex revolutiae suprema est,
Plekhanov had proclaimed in faulty Latin at the Second
Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Party (1903),
scarcely aware of the horrifying deeds with which that
tenet was pregnant. Would a movement which could
massacre proletarians in the name of the dictatorship
of the proletariat, practice terror in order to achieve
social harmony, glory in autocracy in order to establish
universal self-government?would such a movement
shrink from the appeasement of anti-Semitism if it
thought such appeasement would further the "lofty"
cause of communism? The head of the Central Com-
mittee's department on national minorities met the
complaints of a Yiddish writer, Katcherginski, concern-
ing the discrimination against Jews practiced by Soviet
authorities in Lithuania, with the explanation that "the
Jews of Lithuania may have to be sacrificed to the
general cause' .0 The rich and indiscriminate armory of
means wherewith bolshevism professed to pursue Utopia
acquired a fresh instrument, time-honored and of proven
efficacy; and the anti-Semitic spirits, which had been
8 Hitler revealed in the course of one of his celebrated table
talks that "Stalin made no secret before Ribbentrop that he was
waiting only for the moment of maturation of a sufficiently
large indigenous intelligentsia to make short shrift -(Schluss zu
machen) of Jews as a leadership stratum Which he still needs
today." Hiders Tischgespraeche, Bonn, 1951, p. 119.
Sh. Katcherginsky, tsvishn hamer an serp (Between ham-
mer and sickle?Yiddish), Buenos Aires 1950, p. 96.
outlawed by bolshevism and driven to lead a repressed
existence in the subterranean dwellings of Soviet so-
ciety, were now emboldened to emerge and engage in
their practice in the guise of a Communist raison d' etat.10-
(See box on p. 41.)
From Intolerance to Repression
In 1948 Soviet policy towards the Jews acquired a
fresh and disturbing dimension. If hitherto anti-Semi-
tism had been a tool wielded with dispassion and cal-
culated moderation without deeply engaging the spirit
of the Communist leaders, and affecting only those Jews
aspiring to careers in certain fields, now it was fed by
passion and conviction, and was directed against the
entire Jewish community. It was not only anti-Semitism
de logique, to paraphrase Camus' famous phrase; it was
at once logical and passionate.
The affection and enthusiasm displayed by the Jews
of Russia for the newly created state of Israel, to whose
birth the Soviet Union itself had made a modest con-
tribution, provoked Stalin's suspicion that the Jews were
an untrustworthy element whose ties with their numer-
ous brethren abroad made them potential traitors. He
proceeded to treat them accordingly. He decided not
only to render them harmless by encouraging their re-
moval from jobs as security risks, but also to extinguish
their ethnic consciousness. With characteristic totali-
tarian swiftness all Jewish cultural institutions were-
abolished and several hundred Yiddish writers were
arrested: the more prominent among them were exe-
cuted after a secret trial (in 1952), while others ex-
pired in the penal camps of the arctic wasteland. The
10 Trotsky diagnosed the first stealthy manifestations of offi-
cial anti-Semitism in Soviet Russia as symptoms of the bureau-
cratic degeneration afflicting Soviet society. According to him,
having usurped the dictatorship of the proletariat and betrayed
the spirit of the Marxist-Leninist legacy, the Stalinist bureauc-
acy was seeking to use the Jews as a scapegoat for its misrule
and betrayal. L. Trotsky, "Thermidor and Anti-Semitism," The
New International (New York), May 1941, pp. 91-94. The
article bears the date February 22, 1937. This diagnosis, how-
ever, was less applicable for the 1930's than to the period after
World War II. Thus in 1956 during the ferment in the Polish
Communist Party which brought Gomulka to power, the
Stalinist elements, known as the Natolin faction, proposed that
the popular hatred besieging the Communist rulers be placated
by offering the Jewish party members as a sacrificial lamb.
They advocated, in the words of a contemporary revisionist
account, that the governmental and party apparatus be recon-
structed by applying "the criterion of pure Aryan blood."
Ryszard Turski, in Po Prbstu (Warsaw), October 28, 1956.
See also Czeslaw Milosz, "Anti-Semitism in Poland," Problems
of Communism, May-June 1957.
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entry "Jews" in the Soviet Encyclopedia appearing dur-
ing that period described the Jews as if they were an
extinct tribe.11 Before World War II an elaborate net-
work of cultural institutions had served the Jews of
Russia: schools attended by over 100,000 children, a
Yiddish press, a large and prolific Yiddish literary com-
munity, and a theatre rated among the best in the
Soviet Union. By the autumn of 1948 almost nothing
was left in existence. By a stroke of the dictator's pen
all organized Jewish endeavor came to an abrupt end.
Only a score or so of defunct synagogues survived. These
and the withered label of Birobidzhan still incongru-
ously attached to that region on the Amur, which had
never acquired a Jewish character and in which the
Jews formed a hopeless minority, were the only visible
signs of a community of two and a half million.12
From 1948 until the death of Stalin Soviet Jews lived
under a reign of terror amid rumors of their imminent
mass deportation.33
Rehabilitation with a Difference
The death of Stalin and the acquittal of the doctors
involved in the "Doctors' Plot," as well as Pravda's
(April 6, 1953) admission that the affair of the doctors
was a "fabrication" intended to "inflame nationalist
hostilities among the Soviet peoples," removed the
nightmare which had hovered over the Jewish commu-
nity. The terror relented. But the fundamentals of Sta-
lin's policies towards the Jews were retained. As in
many other spheres of Communist endeavor the Stalinist
aims were preserved, only the methods were changed.
The carrot gained ascendancy over the stick, the peaceful
incentive over terror, the indirect approach over the direct
brutal assault.
Stalin's heirs, in the process of their cautious detach-
ment from the most severe features of Stalin's legacy,
set out to right the wrongs inflicted on some nationali-
ties. It will be recalled that seven other ethnic groups
had fallen victim to Stalin's suspicion and vindictive-
ness: the Ingush, the Chechens, the Volga Germans, the
Crimea Tatars, the Kalmyks, the Karachai and the
Balkars. All of them were uprooted at various times
11 Bolshaia Sovetskaia Entsiklopedia, 2nd ed., Vol. 15, Mos-
cow 1952, pp. 377-79.
12 Birobidzhan, an area in eastern Siberia, was set up in the
late 1920's as a "Jewish autonomous region," but due to its
geographic location and severe climatic conditions it never at-
tracted many Jews, whose roots were in the Ukraine and Belo-
russia primarily.
13 See Communist weekly World News (London), Jan. 12,
1957.
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during World War II and banished in their entirety,.
including members of the party and the Komsomol. tc.
remote places. While the expulsion of the Volga Ger-
mans was justified by the authorities as a security meas-
ure?and it was perhaps a more rational measure than
the removal of the Japanese-American from the Pacific
coast during World War II?the deportation of the
other national groups was undertaken on the principle
of collective guilt. The sins of the few were visited
upon the entire community.' The preamble to the offi-
cial decree published in lzvestia, June 26, 1946, an-
nouncing, two years after the expulsion, the dissolution
of the Chechen-Ingush and the Crimean Tatar auto-
nomous republics, stated that collective punishment had
been meted out for the failure of the peoples to combat
those in their midst who were collaborating with the
German enemy. It was this tribal notion of justice
which Khrushchev included in his indictment of Stalin
at the 20th Party Congress:
Not only a Marxist-Leninist but also no man of common
sense can grasp how it is possible to make whole nations
responsible for inimical activity, including women, children,
old people, Communists and Komsomols, to use mass re-
pression against them, and to expose them to misery and suf-
fering for the hostile acts of individual persons or groups of
persons.14
The repressed nationalities have since been restored to
their public identity and some have even been permitted
to return to their native lands. They ceased to be Or-
wellian "un-peoples." Their names reappeared on maps
and in reference works. Even the Volga Germans have
been provided with schools and newspapers.15
This wholesale rehabilitation has not ',embraced the
Jews. To be sure the Jews had not been deported?
although Soviet Jews are convinced that only Stalin's
death saved them from that fate.15 But condemned to
the status of an "un-people," they had been marked
out for cultural extinction and their institutions had
been destroyed. However, it would seem that in Khrush-
chev's view this particular action of Stalin did not fall
into the category of "monstrous acts" and "rude viola-
tions of the basic Leninist principles of the nationality
policy of the Soviet state" 17; it was a deed of prudent
14 See Khrushchev's "secret speech" in The Anti-Stalin Cam-
paign and International Communism, Columbia University
Press, New York, 1956, pp. 57-58.
13. For an account of the rehabilitation, see Walter Kolarz,
"Die Rehabilitierung der liquidierten Sowjetvolker," (The
rehabilitation of Soviet nationalities), Ost Europa (Stuttgart),
June 1957, pp. 414-20.
16 See World News, op. cit.
17 Khrushchev, op. cit., p. 57.
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'statesmanship. In the course of an interview with a
Canadian Communist delegation, Khrushchev, in one of
the unguarded moments of candor to which he is so
often given, showed himself to share Stalin's view of the
Jews as inherent security risks. "Khrushchev," relates the
Canadian Communist, Salsberg, "agreed with Stalin
that the Crimea, which had been depopulated at the war's
end, should not be turned into a Jewish colonization
center, because in case of war it would be turned into
a base for attacking the USSR. . . ." 18
Surely, a people harboring such a ready propensity
to treason could not be allowed to possess cultural
institutions fostering and perpetuating that tendency.
Assimilation through Attrition
Stalin's heirs are determined not to revoke the
edict against the cultural life of the Jews. The plead-
ings of a British Communist group asking that Yiddish
schools and the theatre be restored were met by Suslov
with a categorical refusal befitting that grim guardian
of orthodoxy: "No, these things will not be reinsti-
tuted." 19
This obduracy has been maintained by the Soviet
leaders in spite of its unfavorable impression on West-
ern opinion, which has displayed anxiety over the lot
19 Quoted in The New Leader (New York), Sept. 14, 1959,
P. 9.
19 World News, op. cit.
of the Jews, and in spite of the injuries inflicted on
Communist parties with a substantial proportion of
Jewish members. Three Communist delegations have
taken up the Jewish question with the highest Soviet
leaders: a Canadian delegation in August 1956; a
British delegation in October of the same year; and a
deputation of French Jewish Communists which jour-
neyed to Moscow with the blessing of Thorez early in
1958 for the express purpose of dissuading the Soviet
leaders from their present policy towards the Jewish
minority. All returned empty-handed.
Disillusioned and embittered, Jewish Communists in
Canada, the United States and Britain have deserted
their parties in large numbers. For many years they had
nourished a vision of Soviet Russia which bore little
resemblance to reality. Their imagination had seen a
land in which a multi-national brotherhood informed by
love was laboring towards the realization of Utopia
under the guidance of dedicated leaders, all of them
paragons of Leninist virtue, stern, determined, ruthless
against enemies but full of solicitude for the oppressed
everywhere. In the aftermath of Stalin's death the veil
of illusion dissolved. J. B. Salsberg, leader of the Cana-
dian CP and a member of the delegation to the USSR,
after an interview of two hours, found the First Secre-
tary of the Communist Party and presumed custodian
of Marxism-Leninism to be a man possessed of "a
backward prejudice against the Jewish group as a
people . . . a prejudice which sharply contradicts the
Marxist mode of thought." His "statements smack of
Constitutional Guarantees...
Equality of rights of Soviet citizens, irrespective of
their nationality or race, in all spheres of governmental,
et-onomic, cultural, political and other public activity,
has been inscribed in the Stalin Constitution.
No matter what nation or race a Soviet citizen may
belong to, he enjoys the same political rights as all
other citizens. He may be elected or appointed to any
state office or post. He may work at any job he can
cope with and receives equal pay for equal work. He
may enter any educational institution and engage in
scientific or cultural work . . . with all other citizens.
The Stalin Constitution most strictly prohibits any
direct or indirect restriction of the rights of citizens
on account of their race or nationality.
?From The Social and State Structure of the
USSR, by V. Karpinsky, (Moscow), 1952,
pp. 179-89.
... and Official Rationalization
Khrushchev: At the outset of the Revolution, we had
many Jews in the leadership of the party and the
state . . . In due course, we have created new cadres ...
Pervukhin: . . . our own intelligentsia.
Khrushchev: Should the Jews want to occupy the fore-
most positions in our republic now, it would naturally
be taken amiss by the indigenous inhabitants.
[Madame Furtseva] said that some years back, talk of
anti-Semitism here [in Russia] was stirred as a result
of misinterpretations of certain government actions.
The government had found in some of its departments
a heavy concentration of Jewish people'. . . Steps were
taken to transfer them to other enterprises, giving them
equally good positions and without jeopardizing their
rights.
?From interview in Realites (Paris), May 1957.
Furtseva quoted in National Guardian (New
York), June 25, 1956.
41
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Great Russian chauvinism. . . . His approach to the
problem of Jewish nationality is an unforgivable viola-
tion of socialist democracy." 20 Soon afterwards, Sals-
berg resigned from the party and was followed in this
action by a large number of Jews and non-Jews. The
Canadian party lost some of its ablest leaders and dedi-
cated members. In Montreal, where the Communists
had once been strong enough to elect a member of
Parliament, the party organization virtually ceased to
exist.
In explanation of the absence of Jewish cultural in-
stitutions, Soviet spokesmen usually advance the theory
of "integration." According to this theory, the Jews
have become so integrated into the body of the Russian
people that they have lost all will or capacity for ethnic
self-expression. Eager to submerge in the Russian
majority, they have abandoned Yiddish for Russian.
The breath of life has departed from Jewish culture;
it has died from inanition. This consummation, mark-
ing an advance on the road of history, deserves the ap-
plause of all progressive persons, including Jews. Only
reactionaries could lament it. To revive Jewish institu-
tions would, therefore, be tantamount to reviving a
corpse in defiance of the will of History. According to
Salsberg:
Khrushchev repeated the view . . . that the majority of So-
viet Jews have become integrated into the country's general
life. He emphasized that such integration is historically pro-
gressive, whereas the maintenance of a separate group ex-
istence is reactionary.21
It is true, of course, that the majority of Jews have
come to use Russian in their daily lives?to a large ex-
tent as a result of the assimilationist policies that have
been enforced on them. Still, according to the last
census, 20.8 percent of Soviet Jews have declared Yid-
dish to be their most intimate medium of communica-
20 New Leader, op. cit. That Khrushchev harbors anti-Semitic
feelings of a rather vulgar nature has been evidenced by many of
his utterances made in private. One such adverse pronounce-
ment on the Jews, made in the course of an interview with a
French correspondent of Le Figaro (Paris), April 9, 1958, de-
scribed the Jews as averse to collective work and group disci-
pline, and stung even the most hardened Jewish Communists in
the West, ,whose loyalty survived the crise de conscience pro-
duced by revelations after Stalin's death. "It is incomprehen-
sible how such a statement could come from the leader of the
Soviet state"?quoted from morgn frayhayt, New York, April
13, 1958.) It would be a mistake, however, to infer that the
personal feelings of the dictator govern Soviet policy towards
the Jews. The operative logic of the Soviet system is sufficient
to account for it, although the dictator's sentiments lend a par-
ticular acerbity to some of its features.
21 New Leader, op. cit.
42
tion. To be sure, the percentage is lower than of any
other ethnic group claiming its national language as
the "mother tongue." Yet two factors must be borne in
mind: (1) That it must have taken a certain amount of
courage for Jews to claim Yiddish as their tongue in
the face of official hostility, and that the actual figure
may therefore be considerably larger; and (2) that 20.8
percent still embraces 472,000 people?in absolute fig-
ures, a far larger number than that of two dozen or so
other Soviet nationalities (such as the Buriats, Avars,
Ossetians, and so on) whose languages are not only
tolerated, but actively encouraged by the Soviet author-
ities. Such, indeed, are the canons of the Soviet na-
tionality policy that 472,000 Jews are served by a mea-
ger sheet whose circulation of 1,000 is largely confined
to Birobidzhan, while, say, the 12,000 Chukchi inhabit-
ing the northern region of the RSFSR are served by a
comparable organ of 800 copies.22
The picture becomes fuller when we add that about
80 Yiddish writers, survivors of the decimation of the
Yiddish literary intelligentsia, who are denied a public
forum in their own tongue for their creative talents.
A chosen few may have their works translated into
Russian, if their theme is not of a specific Jewish con-
tent. The others must find contentment in manuscripts
languishing in the obscurity of desk drawers. According
to a highly literate French Jewish Communist, Chaim
Sloves:
The Soviet Jewish writers are more creative today than per-
haps ever before. "Not a day passes that I don't write,"
everyone tells you. And everyone has his own work ready
for the press?volumes of poetry, novels, stories, dramas.
It is not merely literary impetus or prolific creativity: It is,
in the highest sense, sacred dedication.23
Immediately after the Revolution Hebrew was de-
clared a counterrevolutionary language. Since 1948 Yid-
dish literature has been treated as a force inimical to
the purposes of the Soviet government. A unique ap-
plication, indeed, of the official formula "socialist in
content?national in form"!
PURSUING THE GOAL of total assimilation of the
Jews, the regime has for the past three years embarked
on a campaign against the last fragments of communal
life in Russia?the synagogues and the religious
life associated with them. The purpose of this cam-
paign, conducted through the familiar medium of the
22 See census report in Pravda, Feb. 4, 1960. Also in Current
Digest of the Soviet Press (New York), March 2, 1960.
23 Yiddishe kultur (Yiddish culture), New York, Feb. 1959.
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feliillet-on in the press and the occasional radio broad-
.
cast, and practically reinforced by the closing of syna-
gogues in outlying regions, is to deter the Jews from
congregating in compact groups. The process of atomi-
zation is to be brought to its ultimate conclusion. By
insulating the Jews from their co-religionists and co-
nationals in the rest of the world, and by isolating them
from each other, the regime hopes to extirpate the con-
sciousness of kind and thus remove what it thinks is a
source of disaffection from within the Soviet Union. For
Judaism, Soviet propagandists insist, is not only "opium
for the people," but also a creed implanting in its ad-
herents allegiance to foreign powers and infidelity to the
Soviet Union. In a recent broadcast (December 9, 1959)
emanating from Kirovograd in the Ukraine (a town, in-
cidentally, with a notorious record of pogroms in pre-
revolutionary Russia, including the one which the Nar-
odnaya Volya welcomed with such glee), the speaker
inveighed in language of unusual virulence against the
local synagogue and its officials:
. . . the Jewish faith has been strongly intermixed with Jew-
ish bourgeois nationalism and Zionism, already possessing a
strong reactionary essence. . . . Sermons by Rabbi Ayzik
Pektor hardly differ from the woeful theory of the unique-
ness of the Aryan race and its destiny to rule over the peo-
ples of the entire world. ...
The broadcast was saturated wth sheer medievalism:
Among the numerous Jewish feasts, a special place belongs
to Saturday, which should be inspiringly observed by every
Orthodox Jew, for according to the teaching of the Talmud
this is the day of absolute inactivity. And so, on a Satur-
day, when the divine service ends, the faithful disperse, and
. . . the table is laid, vodka, wine and snacks appear, and
toasts to the health of "God's servants" are raised. The
drinking feast (sic) is led by the rabbi's wife, Roza Spektor.
Jewish ministers and circumcisers execute the rite of cir-
cumcision, which has a strikingly nationalistic character.
Its specific significance lies in the fact that it gives proof of
belonging to the "chosen" people?the Jews. At the same
time it imbues Jews with repugnance and hatred of those who
do not possess this special sign....
Judaic sermons are sermons of bourgeois Zionists. Such
sermons are tools of the nationalistic, Israeli, cosmopolitan
American bourgeoisie. With their tentacles, the Jewish
bourgeois nationalists, with the help of Judaism, try to reach
into our Soviet garden. But they will never succeed.24
THE TREATMENT OF the Jews by the Soviet dic-
tatorship is without a full parallel among its policies
toward the other national minorities. A unique people,
the Jews have drawn themselves singular treatment. As
Stalinism departed from the ideals of internationalism
and cosmopolitanism which had inspired the Bolshevik
Revolution, it cynically resorted to anti-Semitism as a
tool of its designs, harkening back to the tradition of
the Narodnaya Volya, in many ways its spiritual an-
cestor. The xenophobia born of its totalitarian isola-
tion?a xenophobia incongruously linked to its inter-
national aspirations and professions?exposed the Jews
to grave suspicion. They were members of a world-
wide fraternity, the greater part of which lived in the
camp of "imperialism," and the creation of the state of
Israel intensified that suspicion. Alone among all the
national minorities the Jews have been condemned to
total assimilation. The Jews are indeed a "chosen
people" in Russia?chosen for cultural extinction.
24 Throughout 1959, a high percentage of the feuilletons
appearing in the Soviet press were devoted to the pillorying
and denunciation of individuals bearing unmistakable Jewish
names, and of synagogues: e.g., 20-25 percent of the pieces in
V echernaia Moskva; 20 percent in Sovetskaia Kultura; 10 per-
cent in Komsomolskaia Pravda; 33 percent in Sovetskaia Latvia.
For representative samples see Prikarpatska Pravda, September
24, 1958; Vechernaia Moskva, March 13, 1959; and Sovetskaia
Moldavia, November 12, 1959. See also The New Leader,
op. cit.
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DISCUSSION
Towards a "Communist Welfare State"?
The reader is referred to the symposium under the
above title in the January-February 1960 issue, con-
taining the article "Social Welfare in the USSR," by
Alec Nove, and comments by Solomon Schwarz, Ber-
tram D. Wolfe, Bertrand de Jouvenel, Peter Wiles,
Richard Lowenthal, and Asoka Mehta?Editors.
A Matter of Definition
YOU HAVE DONE useful service in opening your
columns to this discussion, because it seems to me one
of the fundamental questions with which we shall be
occupied for some time to come. But I sense a certain
confusion in the discussion, which arises, perhaps, from
the fact that Mr. Nove's article is not really addressed
to the question which you raise in your editorial intro-
duction?the possibility of a "Communist welfare
state." All that Mr. Nove says, supported by the evi-
dence which he has assembled with his usual scholarly
care, is that Khrushchev's regime is paying a good deal
more attention to the welfare of the population than
did Stalin's. This is really a very long way off from the
"welfare state" (to which Mr. Nove makes no refer-
ence), at any rate in the sense in which we use the term
in England. For, in our sense it means at least two
things. First, a state in which the welfare of the gov-
erned takes precedence over some of the other aims
which have preoccupied our governments in the past?
national glory, for example, or far-flung empire. Sec-
ondly, a state in which this welfare is achieved with no,
or at all events a minimum of, damage to our traditional
free institutions by which our liberty is ensured. In other
words, it is recognized by all?or so many of us hope?
that increased preoccupation by the state with wide-
spread welfare can constitute a danger to liberty, though
opinions vary as to the extent to which this risk must
be accepted in the interests of social justice.
Now, if one applies to the Soviet Union the synthesis
of questions raised both by Mr. Nove and by you we
arrive at three main questions:
44
Question One: Is the present Soviet regime more pre-
occupied with welfare than its predecessor? Answer:
obviously yes. Whether the motive is fear of public dis-
order, or the inexorable logic of industrial growth, or
some inherent benevolence in Khrushchev's disposition
seems to me of very little practical importance, and
probably undiscoverable, since the motives of politicians
are seldom unmixed.
Question Two: Is welfare the primary preoccupation
of the Soviet regime to the exclusion of such other great
power preoccupations as glory, or empire? Answer:
obviously not?though it is conceivable that it could
become so, if ideology loses all its dynamic, if the ap-
petite for the good and quiet life continues to grow, and
if the party loses its grip.
Question Three: Is the present Soviet regime anxious
lest increased attention to welfare should threaten its
"traditional free institutions"? An absurd question, but
one which helps to remind us how little the welfare
state has to do with Communist regimes, and also that
despotism and welfare are far from incompatible. For
the masses, who are usually ready to trade freedom for
greater material advantages, are satisfied under a "wel-
fare despotism", while the few, with memories of greater
tyranny in the past, are lulled by the benevolence into
tolerating the despotism. On all sides in the Soviet Union
today we see signs of party control digging itself in,
extending its range of influence and interference, de-
vising new "public organizations" through which it can
channel public activity into useful directions which are
at the same time harmless to its own authority?in
short, laying the foundations for that effortless waking
and sleeping subordination of the individual to the col-
lectivity which is the totalitarian ideal. All this can be
much better achieved by increased attention to welfare
than by Stalin's wasteful terror. (May it not even be
one of the motives for the new trend?) That increased
attention to welfare should of itself lead to more free-
dom (and freedom is, I repeat, implicit in the phrase
"welfare state") seems to me incomprehensible.
Leonard Schapiro
The London School of Economics and
Political Science, London, England
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I.
?
ERRATA
P. 19. The author of The Soviet Attitude on Outer Space" spells
his name ANDREW SWATKOVSKY.
P. 25. Editors' Note, lines 12-13, should read: "...even to Com-
munist sympathizers, that Soviet claims in this area..."
P. 29. Box citing "Works on Soviet Nationality Policy": Richard
Pipes' The Formation of the Soviet Union...was published
in 1954.
P. 42. Col. 2, para 2, first sentence should read: The picture
becomes fuller when we add that about 80 Yiddish writers,
survivors of the decimation of the Yiddish literary in-
telligentsia, are denied a public forum...."
P. 64. Col. 1, para 4, second sentence should read: "He accused
the latter of failing to rely_on Mandst_value_theory...':
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