The Yeast of Russia

From their forced incorporation into the Russian empire in the 1700s, to their passionate demands for the freedom to emigrate in the 1960s and 70s, to the role Russia’s powerful Jewry plays today, Jews have left their mark on Russian culture. A culture which has both appreciated and degraded their contributions. With that in mind, and on the occasion of the April 22 beginning of Passover, Judaism’s most important holiday, we asked Rachel Blustain to look past the propaganda and into the history of Jews in Russia.

“Jews, the old, solid yeast of humanity, have always raised the spirit of the world with impassioned, noble ideas, instilling in people the aspiration for something better...”

— Maxim Gorky

This January, the former Soviet dissident, Natan Sharansky, who spent decades agitating for Jews’ right to emigrate to Israel, returned to Russia for the first time in 11 years. Sharansky, who spent nine years languishing in Soviet prisons after being labeled an American spy, returned triumphantly — he is now trade minister of Israel (“the Zionist enemy” during the late Soviet era), and oversees some $500 million in Russian-Israeli trade.

Sharansky’s trip seemed like the fairy tale ending to the troubled saga of the Jewish dissident decades, when quotas kept Jews from universities and employment, and activists were stifled in Soviet jails. In those days, Jews who wished to settle in Israel were depicted in the popular press as Zionist imperialists, and tried as criminals in the courts. Foreigners slipped Soviet Jews Hebrew alphabets in back alleys, as if it were illegal contraband. “You were involved in a risky game and you were sure the game was worth playing,” recalls Michael Chlenov, president of the Jewish Va’ad of Russia, who was also Sharansky’s Hebrew teacher in 1973.

In those heady days, thousands of protesters massed outside of Soviet embassies worldwide — encouraged by Sharansky, his wife Avital and other outspoken voices — chanting the slogan, “Let my people go.” The right to emigrate was the heartbeat of Soviet Jewry, drawing activists together with a clear and palpable goal.

A Different Country

Today, in the 1990s, more than 600,000 Jews have emigrated to Israel from the former Soviet Union (FSU). Many others have left to make new lives in the US, Germany, and even as far away as Australia. In all, some 4-5,000 Jews left the FSU for Israel last year, while 1-2,000 Jews emigrate to North America every month.

This situation is strikingly illustrated in republics like Ukraine, where it is impossible to meet a Jewish person who does not have a relative or even a close friend living abroad. Today, many are leaving in hopes of finding a better economic future. As one single mother, who asked to remain nameless, said, “I don’t know very much about Israel and somehow it frightens me... But I have wasted half my life here just trying to survive.” Faina Pritzer, a coordinator of Jewish youth programming, estimates that, in smaller cities, where there were once 20 or 30 young people very active in Jewish activities and culture, now there are maybe four or five.

Five years ago, Galina Rasina, 17, began to attend the local Jewish youth club in the small city of Sumi in East Ukraine. “When we first met, we knew almost nothing. But we danced, we celebrated the holidays,” she said. And Galina began to understand more and more of her Jewish heritage. Since that time, however, she has seen the majority of her Jewish friends leave for Israel. “It is difficult to be Jewish without the people who surrounded me for so long.”

In spite of Galina’s impression, the overall stream of Jewish emigrants has slowed recently, and, even during the chaotic times of Russia’s 1996 presidential elections, the number of Jews leaving Russia did not increase. In fact, scattered throughout the FSU, handfuls of emigrants who have returned from “exile” can be found. They are significant not so much for their numbers as for the perspectives they offer.

“Israel is a very beautiful country, but it is a very different country,” said one young returnee, a resident of Kiev, capital of Ukraine. “I was 19 when I went to Israel, but I felt like I was three years old. I didn’t know what a mezuzah [A ritual object fastened to the door frames of Jewish homes, usually containing holy scrolls. – Ed.] was and I thought it was something to use if you are being robbed.”

Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, many Jews in Israel and the West held the belief that, once the gates to emigration opened, all Jews, except the old and infirm, would leave, effectively ending the Jewish experience within Russia. But today, despite the mass emigration, countries like Russia and the Ukraine still have some of the largest Jewish populations in the world, populations that many Jews in the Diaspora look to as their spiritual ancestors.

Due to the high rate of intermarriage and to attempts by Jews to hide their Jewish identities during the years of Soviet repression, it is difficult to pinpoint the exact number of Jews in the FSU. Estimates for Russia range from 500,000 to two million, depending on how one characterizes a Jew: by religious faith and practice, ancestry, or simple self-identification. No matter the numerical controversy, it is impossible to deny that today in the FSU the Jewish phenomenon continues.

A People Apart

It is imposible to discuss contemporary Jewish life in Russia without mentioning all that came before. The modern history of Jews in Russia begins with the partition of Poland in the late 1700s; due to Europe’s changing map, the Russian empire suddenly was home to almost a million Jews, speaking their own language (Yiddish), attending their own schools and observing their own religion. Prior to this time, Russia’s tsars had sought to keep Jews out of their country. Even Peter the Great, famous for his friendship to foreigners, inviting them to settle in Russia in the thousands, drew the line at Jews, saying “I prefer to see in our midst nations professing Islam and paganism rather than Jews. It is my endeavor to eradicate evil, not multiply it.”

As Peter’s ‘mission to eradicate evil’ took hold in Russia, condemning Jews to a stagnate existence within the Pale of Settlement, an area delineated by the boundaries of the former Polish kingdom, the Enlightenment swept the Continent, liberating the Jews of Western Europe from the bonds of the ghetto in the dizzying process of assimilation. In contrast to their Western co-religionists, the Jews of Russia were, as the foreign journalist, Harold Fredric, wrote near the end of the 19th century, “a people that dwells apart.”

Despite repressions by the authorities, Russia’s Jewish population grew to five and a half million by the end of the 1880s. Half of those Jews lived in towns and cities, while the rest inhabited the traditional shtetls, or Jewish villages, made famous by the pen of 19th century Yiddishist Sholom Aleichem in his wry and comic characters, Tevye the philosopher-dairyman and Menahem Mendel, the harebrained promoter.

Today, Aleichem is among the Jews returned to Russian soil. For the last several years, audiences have flocked to Moscow’s LenKom theater to see its popular production of Mourner’s Prayer (Pominalnaya Molitva), a story that became famous in America in the film adaptation, Fiddler on the Roof. In it, Aleichem portrayed the final days of traditional Jewish life in the shtetl, in the shadow of pogroms and revolutions, with humorous and heartbreaking prose.

In the years that Aleichem describes, the end of the last century, Jews were prohibited from settling in either Russia’s main cities or her rural townships. Instead, thousands of refugees of Russia’s anti-Semitic policies were crowded into squalid, suffocating conditions. By the end of the century, 40% of Russian Jewry was dependent on Jewish charity. To make matters worse, the government’s manufactured hysteria over Jewish economic exploitation and revolutionary activity culminated in three major waves of pogroms against the Jews between 1881 and 1921.

It was these turbulent years that witnessed the first massive emigration of Jews from the Russian empire, with nearly two million fleeing their ‘motherland’ from 1890 to 1914. But while many left, others chose to remain and fight, creating a highly radicalized Jewish youth, alight with the fires of Zionism, Bundism and revolution. Since, during this period, the number of Jews allowed to study in Russia’s universities was drastically cut, there were those who traveled abroad to be educated. They returned to Imperial Russia to spread the gospels of liberalism and freedom.

The Religion of Revolution

In these circumstances, it was not surprising that, when the revolutions of 1905 and 1917 erupted, Jewish Bolsheviks, Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries played leading roles. Though overall their numbers were in the minority, their public positions and personalities, especially in comparison with political life in pre-revolutionary Russia, made men such as Lev Trotsky, Grigorgi Zinoviev and the infamous Lazar Kaganovich, all the more conspicuous. A point manipulated by many anti-Semitic enemies of communism from the early 1900s to the present. For example, Jewish participation in the Communist revolution enraged Ukrainian nationalists, who took out their wrath on the entire Jewish population during the pogroms of 1918-21. Meanwhile, current Russian nationalists, such as the notorious group Pamyat (Memory) blame Lenin’s ‘crimes’ against Russia on his inherited evil Jewish tendencies: his maternal grandfather was a Jew. Pamyat gets great mileage implicating the omnipotent and ever-powerful ‘Jewish-Masonic conspiracy’ for all Russia’s ills.

With the advent of the Revolution and the abolition of the Pale of Settlement, Jews began to assimilate into Soviet society — the revolution demanded it. After all, in 1913, Lenin had written that, “Jewish national culture is a slogan of the rabbis and the bourgeoisie, a slogan of our enemies.” In the style of their assault on Russia’s churches and cathedrals, the Communist Party began to attack Jewish religious institutions and all those who defended them. Photographs from that time show rallies of protesters carrying signs in Yiddish demanding the closing of all synagogues.

And yet, in spite of the regime’s persecution of Jews, for the first time in Russian history, anti-Semitism was officially frowned upon. The Yiddish language and Jewish cultural societies were allowed to exist as long as they did not challenge the ideology of the state. In response, Jewish theater, culture and the press thrived until mid-century. Two examples of those who made their name in this intoxicating era, with the support and patronage of the Soviet government, were the actor Solomon Mikhoels and the writer Isaac Babel (Red Cavalry). Having risen to great cultural heights, both would eventually be executed on Joseph Stalin’s orders. Mikhoels’ government-ordained murder in 1948 was officially declared a hit-and-run accident, while Babel was arrested in 1939 and tortured for a year before finally being shot.

STALIN’S PLOT

Joseph Stalin’s rise to power would prove to be the turning point for Jews in the Soviet Union, but for political reasons it was not until after World War II that he orchestrated his full-scale campaign against them. It is no secret that Stalin’s anti-Semitic tactics, begun at the beginning of the Cold War, were a way for his government to create enemies to justify Soviet expansion and redirect discontent in the satellite republics and at home.

During World War II, Stalin encouraged the formation of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee to raise American money for Russia’s war efforts. But, after the war, the Committee began to address the concerns of the local Jewish population, which discovered that, on returning home, Jewish collective farms were not restored, Jews’ former homes were shut to them, and Jewish workers were left unemployed. What is more, in December 1948, the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was disbanded, its members arrested. Jews, on charges of Zionist, imperialist or cosmopolitan allegiance, began to be punished for their “disloyalty” to the state.

In January of 1949, besides the arrest and murder of an estimated 114 Jewish writers, the Jewish section of the Writer’s Union was dissolved, the Yiddish presses closed and Jews began to be fired from scientific and academic institutions. By 1952, almost all Jews had been purged from the leadership of the Communist Party. The time was ripe for the notorious 1953 ‘Doctors’ Plot,’ in which nine prominent doctors, six of them Jewish, were arrested for having poisoned top Soviet officials in collusion with Zionist and American forces. Hysterical stories spread throughout the country about Jewish killers in white gowns and anti-Semitic caricatures appeared in leading Soviet newspapers. Stalin’s death on March 5, 1953, saved the lives of those charged and in April, the ‘Doctors’ Plot’ was repudiated and the accelerating intensity of the anti-Semitic campaigns subsided.

An Iron Ceiling

In the post-Stalin era, Jews would again rise to prominent positions in the sciences and arts. Yet strict quotas were in place in many universities and institutes. Jewish medical students were unable to secure posts in the better hospitals, while engineers were frozen out of certain industries. Few Jews could be found in the ranks of the Communist Party, the diplomatic service or military command. Trying to make their way around these quotas, many Jews changed the nationality listed on the fifth line of their passport, assuming Russian or Ukrainian descent. (In an ironic side note, today when these Jews present their papers to the American Immigration and Naturalization Services, the fact that they changed the nationality listed on their passport back to “Jewish” is regarded with skepticism, as reason to suspect that they have forged their papers in order to be more easily granted refugee status.)

Meanwhile, the Soviet government was busy trying to present the USSR to the world as free of discrimination and full of multinational talent. They hastened to mention all the Jewish artists, actors and singers who had shaped Russian culture, yet neglected to note the formidable quotas and stumbling blocks they had overcome.

But it is also an undeniable fact  that many Russian Jews made such a significant contribution to the Russian cultural heritage that they ended up an inalienable part of it. No Soviet war veteran would even think about the Jewish background of Iosif Kobzon, whose war ballads broke hearts across the Soviet Union, or that of Mark Bernes, the popular cinematic hero and bard.  The wit of Soviet stand-up comedian and actor Arkady Raykin who survived many a political regime, was quoted in every Russian household. Ditto the jokes of today’s Mikhail Zhvanetsky. World chess champions Mikhail Botvinnik and Mikhail Tal, writer Samuil Marshak, violonist David Oystrakh, poet Mikhail Svetlov... the list goes on and on. The Russian Jewish Encyclopedia, published in 1994 with the sponsorship of the Israeli Ministry of Education and others, catalogues Russian Jews who have distinguished themselves in different walks of life – culture, science, history, arts and even today’s politics. For example, it includes such political personalities as Duma Deputy Vladimir Zhirinovsky, Deputy Head of the Federal Security Council Boris Berezovsky, Nizny Novgorod Governor Boris Nemtsov,  Russian Finance Minister Alexander Livshits and current Minister of Foreign Relations Yevgeny Primakov.

Let My People Go

But, even as they made Russians laugh and cry, Jews felt the brunt of the Soviet government’s distrust and anger. For example, the defeat of the united Arab forces in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, forces trained and armed by the Soviets, stirred a reemergence of anti-Semitism. But as hatred grew, so did resistance.

The 1960s was the beginning of the Jewish dissident movement, which would eventually encompass tens of thousands of activists in the late 1970s. Using materials smuggled in from abroad, Jews began to meet in flats, dachas, wherever possible, to learn Hebrew and reconnect with their forgotten culture. The KGB, naturally, maintained a close watch on all dissidents, threatening them with unemployment, anonymous phone calls and letters and, more importantly, imprisonment.

In 1965, when Holocaust memorialist Elie Wiesel visited the Soviet Union, he joined the tens of thousands who had gathered in defiance and celebration outside the Arkhipova synagogue in Moscow on the holiday of Simchat Torah. Of that moment, Weisel wrote,”They filled the whole street, spilled over into courtyards, dancing and singing, dancing and singing... Tomorrow they would descend and scatter, disappear into the innermost parts of Moscow, not to be heard from for another year. But they would return and bring more with them.”

Others began to publicly demand the right to emigrate. Letters were smuggled out of the country to call international attention to their demands. Jews and human rights activists around the world were mobilized by the information trickling in. In 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. said, “I cannot stand idly by... and not be concerned about what is happening to my brothers and sisters who happen to be Jews in Soviet Russia.” International conferences and protesters raised the cry, “Let my people go.”

In the 1970s, Soviet-American relations were deeply affected by Soviet Jewry’s right and desire to emigrate. US Senator Henry Jackson, long one of the most ardent supporters of Israel, scotched a centerpiece of US President Richard Nixon’s detente policy by making the US’ granting of Most Favored Nation status to the USSR contingent upon a liberalization of Soviet policy on Jewish  emigration. From 1971 to 1974, the Soviets in fact agreed to concessions in exchange for the MFN agreement, but Jackson continued to escalate his demands. Forced to save face, and believing that detente was doomed when Nixon was forced from office, the Soviets renounced the negotiated arrangement soon after the Jackson-Vanik Amendment to the Trade Reform Act was passed in 1974. As a result, exit visas for Soviet Jews were all but halted.

New Jews in the New Russia

Much has changed about Jewish life in the new Russia. Today, foreign organizations openly pump some $40 million into Jewish programs in the FSU every year. More than a hundred Jewish charity centers have opened throughout the FSU, serving not only the Jewish elderly and needy, but also Jewish activists. In Russia, approximately 2,500 students study in Jewish day schools. An estimated 4,000 more receive a Jewish education in supplementary schools. Directors of a number of schools have begun to develop and distribute their own curriculums, focused on the Russian-Jewish experience instead, as is usually the case, of relying on material from abroad.

Still, in the post-perestroika era in Russia, one no longer sees the euphoria that Wiesel so appreciated. Gone is the wave of enthusiasm, the simple curiosity of the early 1990s, when hundreds of students crowded newly created and formerly banned Jewish studies courses to listen to Americans and Israelis expound on the Torah and Jewish history.

Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, when activists were drawn together by a common mission and a need to support each other in the face of danger, Mr. Chlenov asserts, “we had a very Jewish life in spite of the absence of a synagogue.” Today though, with all the greater freedoms, those ties are gone. But, if that is the case, what model should Jews in Russia be building toward? The cramped, suffocating shtetls are gone, but so is most of the burgeoning pre-revolutionary Jewish intelligentsia. What is the alternative? Where are Russian Jews heading? What does it mean to be a Jew in a society so aware of ethnic divisions?

Paths to the Past

Religion, at best, can only be a partial answer. No more than an estimated 5% of Jews in the FSU are religious. Only a third of the people in Russia whose nationality is listed as “Jewish” on their passports say they practice the Jewish faith. On a typical Sabbath morning in the Choral Synagogue in Moscow, old men fill up the first few rows of the resounding main sanctuary. The drone of the Orthodox service reverberates in the emptiness.

For those who do hunger for religion, access itself can be a problem. In the Russian city of Yaroslavl, with an estimated 2,500 Jews, some dozen elderly men and women meet every Saturday to read through the Sabbath service, mainly in Russian, with a smattering of Hebrew. There is no rabbi, no one to teach them the melodies of the prayers, so those who know a little less simply follow those who know a little more.

In Chernigov, in Eastern Ukraine, a small gathering of women, alienated from the strict Orthodox service offered in their city, have begun their own prayer group. They are led by Lyudmila Schulman, whose dream is to one day become a Reform rabbi. Since Lyudmila has no direct contact with any of the more liberal branches of Judaism, when an American Jew visits, she hungrily asks for basic information.

If religion does not attract the majority of Jews in the FSU, some are finding other ways to reconnect with their Jewish heritage. Many Jewish elderly who came to the Jewish centers to get assistance have since begun to work there as volunteers, forming links with one another and with their common Jewish past. Jewish writers have been rediscovered and their uncensored works are translated and published. A few Jewish scholars even continue to frequent the former Soviet archives, publishing works on Russian-Jewish history despite the paltry sums they receive and the relative academic vacuum in which they labor. About 400-500 students study in Jewish university programs throughout Moscow, discovering paths to their Jewish roots through history and philology rather than through the prayer book.

A recent conference of Jewish university students held by Hillel, an American-based Jewish youth organization, drew together some 250 students from as far away as Azerbaidzhan and Moldova. At the conference, the American leaders taught their eager counterparts some of the rudiments of Jewish prayer and faith. Later, the FSU students offered perspectives on their own experiences, on the Jewish theaters they had opened, the Jewish youth clubs they had organized, and the Jewish newspapers they were editing. In a program organized this past spring by the American-Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, some students spent Passover traveling to small cities to celebrate the holiday with elderly Jews who had long ago forgotten the traditions. As she hosted a holiday service, one student explained, she felt for the first time what it meant to be part of the Jewish community.

Nationalism Redux

These signs of the rebirth of Jewish life are taking place despite the fact that Russia today is experiencing a surge of nationalist radicalism. At rallies this summer for Communist-Nationalist presidential candidate Gennady Zyuganov, signs denouncing Judaism as “Hebrew Fascism” and demanding an end to “the Jewish invention-private banks” were in abundance. During the run up to the elections, Neo-Nazis sporting swastikas and burning Israeli and American flags rallied on Moscow’s Mayakovsky Square. Zyuganov was recently quoted in Moskovsky Komsomolets, one of Russia’s biggest newspapers, as declaring that “there are no poor Jews in the Soviet Union.”

A 1996 survey of 612 St. Petersburg Jews conducted by the Bay Area Council for Jewish Rescue and Renewal found that, in the past year, 12% of respondents claimed they had been physically attacked (pushed, kicked, spat on) because they were Jewish. Some 54% said they had been the object of anti-Semitic name-calling.

Meanwhile, in Yaroslavl, the Jewish center is a place where old men sit peacefully drinking tea and playing chess. On a Friday night, some Jewish youths might gather there to listen to Jewish music, smoke cigarettes and share a bottle of Jewish wine. This spring however, a bomb blew out the center’s windows, crumbling its walls. In August, another bomb caused $15,000 in damages at a Moscow synagogue.

Despite these facts, a surprising survey released last year by the American Jewish Committee and ROMIR Public Opinion and Market Research found that “hostility towards Jews in Russia today appears to be relatively low.” As evidence, the report found that “many other groups... are viewed far more negatively than Jews.” To the question, “Please tell me whether you would like to have Jews as neighbors,” 17% of those asked responded that they would “prefer not,” as opposed to 54% who said they would prefer not to have Chechens as neighbors.

Last year, some of the wealthiest and most influential men in Russia decided to bankroll a new Jewish organization, the Russian Jewish Congress, in an attempt to raise Jewish capital at home. Its president, Vladimir Gussinsky, is the founder of Moscow’s Most Group, which includes Most Bank, and he currently heads Most Media, a megamedia holding company that includes television stations and newspapers. Many of the Congress’ other board members hail from the clan of entrepreneurs who stand close to the country’s reins of power. The willingness of these high-stakes power brokers to be so vocal in their Jewishness seems to signal a new era in Jewish comfort.

A Future for Jews in Russia?

Not everyone, though, is so sanguine. There are those who worry that such Jewish visibility could engender a anti-Semitic backlash.

“Now we have a lot of Jewish people in government,” said Evgenia Michalova, the director of the Moscow branch of Hillel. “They want to participate in Russian government. Okay, it’s normal for me. But they help anti-Semites to find enemies.”

With the current political and economic uncertainties in today’s Russia, some people suggest that, even if the current situation seems tranquil, Jews should not stay in a country where they have experienced so many centuries of strife. Such talk, however, angers Michael Chlenov. “I am not involved in discussions with people who say Russia is an intrinsically anti-Semitic country.” But when asked whether he feels the future for Jewish youth in Russia is bleak,  Chlenov curtly, without any elaboration, agrees.

It seems a innocuous assumption, but for Jewish activists, especially outside the capitals, it is an assumption fraught with controversy. The head of the Jewish community in Chernigov, Felix Kagno, is by no means alone in his belief when he said, “The future of Jewish life here is charity.”

But is that necessarily true? Last year, the first class of students graduated from the Judaica Project, a joint American-Russian program, created in the hopes of training a new cadre of scholars to work in Russia in the field of Judaica Studies. Faced with the bleak prospects for academics in contemporary Russia, many of the students began looking for places in the work force or seeking acceptance in university programs abroad.

Yet, even if the Judaica Project has not succeeded in all of its scholarly goals, its rigorous academic program has other, sociological, side effects. For example, Karina Kheifets, a graduate of Judaica Project, found out about the program almost “by accident” five years ago, she said. She was really trying to find a way out of studying computers in a department that had only four computers for 100 pupils. She thought that since she was Jewish, the program would have to accept her.

At the time, she admitted, “I didn’t know anything about Jews. I was very assimilated. The only thing I knew was a song my grandmother sings in Yiddish about Lenin.” In fact, Karina said, she was “ashamed to be Jewish,” having heard anti-Semitic comments from her Jewish family members for years.

After five years of studying, of learning Hebrew and Yiddish, spending a semester in Israel and months in the Communist archives researching the history of the Jewish Communist Youth League, Karina said, “I feel very, very Jewish, not in religious ways. I eat pork,” she added with a laugh. And even though she currently sells real estate and has no plans to return to scholarly pursuits, she is proud of what she learned about herself and her community. Today, Karina describes her Jewishness and her outlook thus, “I don’t feel better than anybody else, but I don’t feel worse. I just feel that Judaism is mine.”

Rachel Blustain is Moscow correspondent for the American Jewish newspaper The Forward.